Ocean Subsurface Study from ICESat-2 Mission

NASA has launched the ICESat-2 satellite in September 2018 with the primary purpose of monitoring changes in the elevation of ice at high latitudes. Fortunately, additional and unrealized information from the penetration of laser light below the ocean's surface offers a new and exciting opportunity to study ocean biology over the open sea water and below sea ice. We have proposed a novel algorithm to determine ocean subsurface optical properties, such as, diffuse attenuated coefficient, k _d (/m), total backscattering coefficients b _b (/m), and layerintegrated ocean subsurface backscatter from ICESat-2/ATLAS lidar measurements. Our ICESat-2 ocean subsurface results reveal high vertical resolution through the water column that have been hidden in the ocean color record from passive sensors. The comparisons between ICESat-2/ATLAS retrieved ocean subsurface results and Aqua/MODIS ocean color records indicate that the ICESat-2 retrieved ocean subsurface results compare reasonably well with MODIS ocean color results with the mean relative differences less than 10%.