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Magruder: The track we're going to talk about today is the ICESat-2 flight over the Great Bahama Bank. This is interesting

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because you might notice the really strong returns from beneath the surface of the water.

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Although this is a pretty shallow area--about ten

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meters or 30 feet deep--the signal is quite strong, just as

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strong as from the surface of the water. The reason that is there’s a lot of limestone

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in the deposits there, and it’s highly reflective. So ICESat-2

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gets a lot of reflected photons back from those laser shots. 

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So ICESat-2 provides bathymetric measurements. And what that means is

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measurements beneath the surface of the water, so we can map the topography

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underwater. Which is really important when you think about studying coral reefs

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or fish habitats or just sedimentation.

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Or how the topography under the water moves for storm surge modeling.

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It’s a really important measurement that usually we make from aircraft

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that can only cover small areas.
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