Abstract: Accurately identifying water observations is quite important for researches of inland hydrographic net monitoring and sea surface height determination in ice-covered ocean with satellite laser altimetry observations of ICESat/GLAS. By analyzing the features of waveform from ICESat/GLAS observation upon water and taking the effect of saturation and forward scattering into account, an automatic method of identifying ICESat/GLAS observations upon water with waveform parameters provided in GLA14 data set is proposed. Test results suggest that the accuracy of the proposed method is over 90%, hence providing effective support and help for inland water monitoring.

Key words: ICESat/GLAS, waveform, reflectivity, pulse width, kurtosis, skewness