Autoencoders for Denoising Atmospheric Profiles from ICESat-2

^(a) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, 20771, USA
^(b) Science Systems and Applications Inc., Lanham, MD, 20706, USA Lead Author e-mail address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Published online: 9 April 2026

Abstract

The 2^nd generation Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) is an altimetry mission designed primarily for measuring ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness, provides atmospheric profiles of clouds and aerosols at 532 nm using a photo counting detection approach. While highly sensitive for the detection of tenuous aerosol and cloud features, during the day signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) photon counting detectors are adversely impacted by solar contributions to the total signal. Averaging the data to coarser horizontal resolutions has been the standard way to increase SNR and thus allow clouds and aerosols to be more easily detectable. Recent work has demonstrated success in boosting SNR without decreasing resolution using advanced filtering techniques [Yorks et al., 2021], however, rapid advancements in Deep Learning based image denoising algorithms can further improve the SNR. Here, we present results using a state-of-the-art Deep Learning autoencoder applied to noisy daytime ICESat-2 data to improve SNR and discuss implications for atmospheric feature detection, classification, and optical property retrievals.