Spaceborne large footprint lidar (ICESat GLAS) has acquired over 250 million lidar observations over forest regions globally, an unprecedented dataset of vegetation heights. The ICESat Vegetation Product (IVP) was developed aimed at a global forest height dataset. Because of its high vertical resolution, large spatial extent and 70 m footprint characteristics, it is difficult to validate this product with other available remote sensing product or field measurements. To evaluation the IVP product in China, airborne waveform data was collected along several ICESat GLAS obits in the Southwest and West of China. The preliminary results show that the R2 is 0.41 and RMSE is 2.69 m between the vegetation height from airborne data and ICESat Vegetation Product at forest stand level in most cases. For those cases where the GLAS shots and airborne datasets gave very difference results, the airborne lidar data were synthesis to GLAS waveform and compared with the GLAS waveform. Those waveforms from fluctuated terrain also have several peaks and large waveform extent, which cased error in forest height estimation.

Date Published: 3 November 2010
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 7841, Sixth International Symposium on Digital Earth: Data Processing and Applications, 784114 (3 November 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.873247

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7841:
Sixth International Symposium on Digital Earth: Data Processing and Applications
Huadong Guo; Changlin Wang, Editor(s)