Assessing the agreement of ICESat-2 terrain and canopy height with airborne lidar over US ecozones

Despite its critical importance to carbon storage modeling, forest vertical structure remains poorly characterized over large areas. Canopy height estimates from current satellite missions such as ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2) offer promise to close this knowledge gap, but their validation is critically important to inform their measurement uncertainties and scientific utility. Using existing airborne laser scanning (ALS) data, the agreement of a variety of terrain and aboveground canopy height metrics including summary height statistics and percentiles, from ICESat-2’ Land, Water and Vegetation Elevation product (ATL08) product was assessed in 12 sites across six major biomes in the United States. The agreement between ATL08 and ALS heights was assessed using the mean bias (Bias, ATL08 – ALS), the mean absolute error (MAE) and their percent equivalents, percent bias (pBias) and percent MAE (pMAE), respectively. In general, the agreement between ATL08 and ALS terrain heights was high (Bias 0.18 m, pBias 0.1%) while canopy heights showed lower agreement (Bias −1.71 m, pBias −15.9%). Analyses by biome, time of acquisition and beam strength of the ICESat-2 photon data also showed generally higher agreement for ATL08 terrain than canopy heights. Analyses also showed the performance of ATL08 heights varied with canopy cover with ATL08 terrain heights showing the best agreement when canopy cover was between 40 and 70% while the best performance for ATL08 canopy heights was observed when canopy cover was greater than 80%. This observation, coupled with analyses by biome, indicate that ATL08 canopy heights are more suitable in relatively dense canopy environments such as conifer and broadleaf forests than relatively sparse environments such a temperate grassland and Savannas. Higher level canopy height percentiles (95th and 98th) showed higher agreement (mean Bias −12.5%) with ALS heights than lower percentiles (minimum, 25th , mean pBias ~39.2%). These findings indicate that ATL08 canopy heights show more promise for routine canopy height characterization using the 95th and 98% percentiles but is limited in characterizing intermediate vertical structure. The observed performance differences between ATL08 terrain and canopy heights are attributed to differences in photon sampling rates over terrain and canopy surfaces which, compounded with background noise in ICESat-2 photon data, led to different effectiveness for ATL08 processing routines in filtering terrain and off-terrain points. This assessment of the impact of a variety of factors provides the vegetation community with an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of height estimates from the ICESat-2 ATL08 product. • Assessed ICESat-2’ ATL08 terrain and canopy heights across multiple sites in the US. • Evaluated ATL08 heights by site, biome, acquisition time and beam strength. • ATL08 terrain heights agreed closely with airborne lidar data across sites/factors. • ATL08 canopy heights varied widely compared to lidar across sites or factors. • These results inform usability of ATL08 data across a variety of factors.