WEBVTT FILE

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000
[music]

2
00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:08.000
[music]

3
00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:12.000
Magruder: The track we're going to talk about today is the ICESat-2 flight over the Great Bahama Bank. This is interesting

4
00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:16.000
because you might notice the really strong returns from beneath the surface of the water.

5
00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:20.000
Although this is a pretty shallow area--about ten

6
00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:24.000
meters or 30 feet deep--the signal is quite strong, just as

7
00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000
strong as from the surface of the water. The reason that is there’s a lot of limestone

8
00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:32.000
in the deposits there, and it’s highly reflective. So ICESat-2

9
00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:36.000
gets a lot of reflected photons back from those laser shots.

10
00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:40.000
So ICESat-2 provides bathymetric measurements. And what that means is

11
00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:44.000
measurements beneath the surface of the water, so we can map the topography

12
00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:48.000
underwater. Which is really important when you think about studying coral reefs

13
00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:52.000
or fish habitats or just sedimentation.

14
00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:56.000
Or how the topography under the water moves for storm surge modeling.

15
00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:00.000
It’s a really important measurement that usually we make from aircraft

16
00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:06.112
that can only cover small areas.
[music]