Two-Dimensional Arctic Sea Ice Pressure Ridge Structures from a Triangulated Surface Model

Overview This repository provides the data products and outputs derived in the study “Extracting Arctic Sea Ice Pressure Ridges from Large-scale Airborne Laser Scanner Point Clouds” (Qian et al., 2026). The study by Qian et al. (2026) explores a topology-based method to extract two-dimensional (2D) sea-ice pressure ridge structures from lidar point clouds. The 2D representations of sea ice surface were constructed as triangulated irregular networks (TINs) built from airborne laser scanner (ALS) point-cloud data. Airborne Data The ALS data were collected on April 10, 2019 in the southeastern Beaufort Sea (Hendricks et al., 2019) during the IceBird 2019 Winter airborne campaign conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany. Triangulated sea ice surface models were constructed directly from irregular ALS elevations. Discrete Morse theory (Forman, 1998) was applied to identify maxima, saddles, and the gradient paths connecting them, before pressure ridge structures were identified. This data repository includes the TIN sea-ice surface representations generated from three segments of ALS data as well as the ridge-structure extraction results, produced using both a distributed computational network and a single-machine approach, following the methodology described in Qian et al. (2026) and extending the methods introduced in Song et al. (2026). Satellite Data During the AWI IceBird 2019 Winter campaign, there was one collocated survey with an ICESat-2 orbit located in the Eastern Beaufort Sea (ICESat-2 cycle 3 RGT189) on April 10, 2019. The strong center beam was targeted (gt2L for this time-period). This repository contains ICESat-2 ridge sails, detected and extracted from the ICESat-2 ATL03 photon height product (Neumann et al., 2025) using the University of Maryland Ridge Detection Algorithm (UMD-RDA) as described in Duncan & Farrell (2022). The file has been subsetted to the study region, projected to EPSG:3413, and drift-corrected for comparison with the relevant IceBird ALS data segments.