:alt: ICESat-2 mission logo
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ICESat-2 Cookbook

This Project Pythia Cookbook is a compilation of tutorials developed from 2019 to present as part of the NASA / UW eScience hackweek program. The purpose of the tutorials is to help people with data access and to demonstrate a variety of disciplinary use cases.

Motivation

The ICESat-2 mission provides valuable data for measuring changes in glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice, clouds and land surface systems. There are numerous data products and methods for accessing and analyzing data. The goal of these tutorials is to streamline data access, reduce duplication of effort and build an open science community around ICESat-2 algorithms and software.

Authors

• Ben Smith
• Michalea King
• Tyler Sutterley
• Anthony Arendt
• Jessica Scheick
• Mark Welden-Smith
• Tasha Snow
• Hannah Besso
• Scott Henderson
• David Shean
• Philipp Arndt
• Chancelor Roberts
• Rohaiz Haris
• Karina Zikan
• Zach Fair

Contributors

Structure

This cookbook is organized into four main sections: Preamble, Foundations, Example Workflows, and Additional Resources.

Preamble

• Governance
• Contributing
• Community Engagement
• How to Cite

Foundations

• Mission Overview
• Filtering
• Geospatial Transforms
• Visualization

Example Workflows

• Land Ice
• Snow Depth

Additional Resources

• Awesome ICESat-2
• CryoCloud

Running the Notebooks

You can either run the notebook using Binder or on your local machine.

Running on Binder

The simplest way to interact with a Jupyter Notebook is through Binder, which enables the execution of a Jupyter Book in the cloud. The details of how this works are not important for now. All you need to know is how to launch a Pythia Cookbooks chapter via Binder. Simply navigate your mouse to the top right corner of the book chapter you are viewing and click on the rocket ship icon, (see figure below), and be sure to select “launch Binder”. After a moment you should be presented with a notebook that you can interact with. I.e. you’ll be able to execute and even change the example programs. You’ll see that the code cells have no output at first, until you execute them by pressing {kbd}Shift+{kbd}Enter. Complete details on how to interact with a live Jupyter notebook are described in Getting Started with Jupyter.

Note, not all Cookbook chapters are executable. If you do not see the rocket ship icon, such as on this page, you are not viewing an executable book chapter.

Running on Your Own Machine

If you are interested in running this material locally on your computer, you will need to follow this workflow:

1. Clone the https://github.com/ICESAT-2HackWeek/icesat2-cookbook repository:

    git clone https://github.com/ICESAT-2HackWeek/icesat2-cookbook.git

2. Move into the icesat2-cookbook directory

   cd icesat2-cookbook

3. Create and activate your conda environment from the environment.yml file

   conda env create -f environment.yml
   conda activate icesat2-cookbook

4. Move into the notebooks directory and start up Jupyterlab

   cd notebooks/
   jupyter lab

Running with Pixi

Alternatively, you can use Pixi for a more streamlined environment management experience:

1. Install Pixi following the installation instructions

2. Clone the https://github.com/ICESAT-2HackWeek/icesat2-cookbook repository:

   git clone https://github.com/ICESAT-2HackWeek/icesat2-cookbook.git

3. Move into the icesat2-cookbook directory

   cd icesat2-cookbook

4. Install dependencies and start JupyterLab with a single command:

   pixi run start

This will automatically create the environment, install all dependencies, and launch JupyterLab in the notebooks directory.

Exporting Conda Environment with Pixi

If you're using pixi and want to generate a conda-compatible environment.yml file for sharing or reproducibility:

pixi run export-env

This command will export the pixi workspace to a conda environment file (environment.yml) that can be used with conda or mamba.