Dr. Magruder will share details about her team’s work developing ATL24, a space laser technology to map mysterious coastal areas known as the nearshore—the space between the shoreline and deeper waters. Bathymetric LiDAR uses spaceborne laser scanning to measure underwater terrain, because its green wavelength photon-counting LiDAR signal can penetrate the water column to provide both the water surface height and seafloor depth (up to ~50 meters) from 300 miles away. ATL stands for Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter (ATLAS) system, which is the only instrument aboard the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2). This satellite is part of NASA’s Earth Observing System for measuring ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness, as well as land topography, vegetation characteristics, and clouds. After ICESat-2 launched, researchers developed algorithms, tools, and workflows to extract bathymetric data, but much of the source code, tools, and datasets wasn’t made public. To address this, the team began work in 2022 on ICESat-2 bathymetric data product known as ATL24. Their work has a range of applications for coastal and marine science management, nearshore habitat research, as well as marine navigation and engineering.