Introducing icepyx, an open source Python library for obtaining and working with ICESat-2 data

Within a year of its launch date, the ATLAS altimeter on board ICESat-2 is already providing a wealth of critical data of interest across and beyond the cryospheric sciences. With the satellite returning nearly 1 TB of raw data per day, traditional practices of individual research groups downloading large granules of data and then subsetting, processing, and storing them locally are ultimately impractical. We are leading the development of icepyx (formerly icesat2py), an open source Python library designed to easily query, filter, download, and pre-process ICESat-2 datasets. The project’s documentation will include interactive Jupyter Notebook examples, providing a starting point for researchers to create and customize workflows to address their research questions. We actively invite contributions from the community to ensure the project develops in a way that meets a wide range of research needs. The project aims to leverage existing libraries that enable easy parallelization and can be run locally or on...