IN037-07
icepyx: Developing Community and Software Around ICESat-2 Data

Tuesday, 15 December 2020: 08:48
Virtual
Jessica Scheick1, Anthony A Arendt2, Lindsey Justine Heagy3, Fernando Paolo4, Fernando Perez3 and Amy E Steiker5,6, (1)Climate Change Institute, Orono, ME, United States, (2)University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, (3)University of California, Berkeley, Statistics, Berkeley, CA, United States, (4)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (5)University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (6)National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, CO, United States
Abstract:
The icepyx project consists of a community of researchers, data specialists, and users of NASA’s ICESat-2 Mission. The icepyx library is an open-source Python package for easily obtaining and working with ICESat-2's large, complex datasets. icepyx began as a workshop project aimed at simplifying programmatic access to ICESat-2’s massive data products and streamlining common tasks like visualization and data pre-processing; these are tasks that new users found particularly challenging with existing programmatic options due to the high volume and complexity of the altimetry data. icepyx quickly grew into a full-scale open-source project with a continuously expanding development team and user base.

As software, icepyx minimizes the time researchers spend on data search, acquisition, and pre-processing, thereby facilitating data analysis and interpretation. Acting as a wrapper around Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) supported by the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC), icepyx enables data acquisition in as few as three lines of code versus ~50. Features in the works include quick visualization, easy reading/writing, and support for common analysis operations with ICESat-2 datasets.

As a community, icepyx facilitates discussions around working with ICESat-2 data, educating new users about the data's structure and best practices and providing a platform for sharing analysis methods and resources. Detailed documentation and Jupyter Notebook examples allow easy customization of workflows even for those with limited Python experience. icepyx is a welcoming and open community that strives to enable all ICESat-2 data users to contribute, regardless of their level of coding experience. Our presentation will demonstrate pathways for researchers to streamline their ICESat-2 workflows and to join this growing and vibrant community dedicated to sharing open-source tools.

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