Icesat terrain height data format

[heidot]

I tried recently to look at the h_te_interp variable. I added this to my download, all good. But I can't understand the format of the data.

Latitude, longitude and canopy height have all the same shapes as arrays, eg (2185, 5) - there are always five columns and an indefinite number of rows (why such shape?) But h_te_interp would come as simply (2185). Therefore, I can't map the terrain height values to any particular lon/lat pair :( . How should I understand this variable?

[NSIDC - mbeig]

Happy to help! Could you please share the file name for the particular file you are referring to in your question below? That way I can download it myself and look at the exact variables you are looking at. For the example file I'm currently looking at I see that h_te_interp has an array length of 1868 based upon delta_time, and has delta_time, latitude and longitude as coordinate variables in the metadata. And delta_time, latitude and longitude all have the same array length (1868). Could you also please share which software you are using to examine your file, as well as any customization or reformatting you may have requested? Thanks!

Example metadata for h_te_interp

Variable full name: gt1l/land_segments/terrain/h_te_interp
float h_te_interp(delta_time=1868);
:_FillValue = 3.4028235E38f; // float
:long_name = "interpolated terrain surface height";
:units = "meters";
:source = "Land ATBD section 4.9";
:contentType = "modelResult";
:description = "Interpolated terrain surface height above the WGS84 Ellipsoid at the midpoint of the segment.";
:coordinates = "../delta_time ../latitude ../longitude";
:_ChunkSizes = 10000U; // uint