ABoVE: LVIS L3 Gridded Vegetation Structure across North America, 2017 and 2019

This dataset provides Level 3 (L3) footprint-level gridded metrics and attributes collected from NASA's Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS)-Facility instrument for each flightline from 2017 and 2019. In 2017, the LVIS-Facility instrument was flown at a nominal flight altitude of 28,000 ft onboard a Dynamic Aviation Super King Air B200T. In 2019, the LVIS-Facility and LVIS-Classic instruments were flown at a nominal flight altitude of 41,000 feet onboard the NASA Gulfstream V. LVIS data are collected as waveforms over footprints of ~10-m diameter. The L3 data include grids of canopy relative height (RH), complexity, canopy cover (CC), ground elevation, and the number of LVIS footprints available to produce a pixel's estimate.. These 30-m resolution grids describe the vertical column of the vegetation canopy in detail with relative canopy height metrics and are enriched with an additional set of canopy cover estimates at a variety of height thresholds. The LVIS-Facility instrument 2017 and 2019 acquisitions span Arctic, boreal, temperate, and sub-tropical landscapes in support of a variety of Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE)- and Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI)-related science. In the ABoVE study domain of arctic and boreal Alaska and Western Canada, some of these acquisitions coincide spatially with legacy small-footprint airborne lidar. Data are included for the ABoVE domain and also for the continental U.S. and central America in support of GEDI calibration and validation. Data files are provided in GeoTIFF format and one geopackage file shows flightlines.