Processed airborne radio-echo sounding data from the POLARGAP survey covering the South Pole, and Foundation and Recovery Glaciers, East Antarctica (2015/2016)

During the austral summer of 2015/16, a major international collaboration funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and with in-kind contribution from the British Antarctic Survey, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF), acquired ~38,000 line km of aerogeophysical data. The primary objective of the POLARGAP campaign was to carry out an airborne gravity survey covering the southern polar gap of the ESA gravity field mission GOCE, beyond the coverage of the GOCE orbit (south of 83.5degS), however aeromagnetics and ice-penetrating radar data were also opportunistically acquired. This survey covers the South Pole and Recovery Lakes, as well as parts of the Support Force, Foundation and Recovery Glaciers.

Our Twin Otter aircraft was equipped with dual-frequency carrier-phase GPS for navigation, radar altimeter for surface mapping, wing-tip magnetometers, an air-sea gravity meter, and a new ice-sounding radar system (PASIN-2).

We present here the full radar dataset consisting of the deep-sounding chirp and shallow-sounding pulse-acquired data in their processed form, as well as the navigational information of each trace, the surface and bed elevation picks, ice thickness, and calculated absolute surface and bed elevations. This dataset comes primarily in the form of NetCDF and georeferenced SEGY files. To interactively engage with this newly-published dataset, we also created segmented quicklook PDF files of the radar data.

NOTE: Please note that an issue with the floats in the NetCDF variable "UTC_time_layerData" has resulted in this variable having rounded up decimal numbers. In order to fix this issue, we advise users who need this variable to download the separately published bed pick data for the POLARGAP survey (doi: https://doi.org/10.5285/d55e87dd-a74d-4182-be99-93ab805103ab) and use the ''DateTime_YYYY-MM-DD_HH:MM:SS.S'' column which is the same as the one used to produce the NetCDF.

Alternate title: Polar Data Centre (PDC) record GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01552

Date (Publication): 2022-06-08

Citation identifier: http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/dms/metadata.php?id= / GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01552

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Antarctic Survey		pdc@bas.ac.uk	Custodian
NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre	Ferraccioli, F., Forsberg, R., Matsuoka, K., Olesen, A., Jordan, T., Corr, H., Robinson, C., & Kohler, J.	pdc@bas.ac.uk	Originator

Maintenance and update frequency: Unknown

Keywords

NDGO0001

NERC OAI Harvesting

NERC_DDC

GCMD Parameter Valids

EARTH SCIENCE > Cryosphere > Glaciers/Ice Sheets
EARTH SCIENCE > Cryosphere > Glaciers/Ice Sheets > Glacier Elevation/Ice Sheet Elevation
EARTH SCIENCE > Cryosphere > Glaciers/Ice Sheets > Glacier Thickness/Ice Sheet Thickness
EARTH SCIENCE > Cryosphere > Glaciers/Ice Sheets > Glacier Topography/Ice Sheet Topography
EARTH SCIENCE > Spectral/Engineering > Radar

BAS Free-text keywords

Antarctic
aerogeophysics
ice thickness
radar
surface elevation

Use limitation: This data is covered by a UK Open Government Licence ( http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/). Further by downloading this data the user acknowledges that they agree with the NERC data policy ( http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/data/policy.asp), and the following conditions:

1. To cite the data in any publication as follows:

Ferraccioli, F., Forsberg, R., Matsuoka, K., Olesen, A., Jordan, T., Corr, H., Robinson, C., & Kohler, J. (2021). Processed airborne radio-echo sounding data from the POLARGAP survey covering the South Pole, and Foundation and Recovery Glaciers, East Antarctica (2015/2016) (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/E8A29FA7-A245-4A04-8B56-098DEFA134B9

2. The user recognizes the limitations of data. Use of the data is at the users'' own risk, and there is no warranty as to the quality or accuracy of any data, or the fitness of the data for your intended use. The data are not necessarily fully quality assured and cannot be expected to be free from measurement uncertainty, systematic biases, or errors of interpretation or analysis, and may include inaccuracies in error margins quoted with the data.

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: This data is covered by a UK Open Government Licence ( http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/). Further by downloading this data the user acknowledges that they agree with the NERC data policy ( http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/data/policy.asp), and the following conditions:

1. To cite the data in any publication as follows:

Ferraccioli, F., Forsberg, R., Matsuoka, K., Olesen, A., Jordan, T., Corr, H., Robinson, C., & Kohler, J. (2021). Processed airborne radio-echo sounding data from the POLARGAP survey covering the South Pole, and Foundation and Recovery Glaciers, East Antarctica (2015/2016) (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/E8A29FA7-A245-4A04-8B56-098DEFA134B9

2. The user recognizes the limitations of data. Use of the data is at the users'' own risk, and there is no warranty as to the quality or accuracy of any data, or the fitness of the data for your intended use. The data are not necessarily fully quality assured and cannot be expected to be free from measurement uncertainty, systematic biases, or errors of interpretation or analysis, and may include inaccuracies in error margins quoted with the data.

Language: English

Topic category

Elevation
Geoscientific information

Begin date: 2015-12-07

End date: 2016-01-19

Reference system identifier: OGP / urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::4326

Distribution format

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
Polar Data Centre - British Antarctic Survey		pdc@bas.ac.uk	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
http		GET DATA

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Domain consistency

Measure identification: INSPIRE / Conformity_001

Conformance result

Title: INSPIRE Data Specification on unknown theme Guidelines

Date

Explanation: See the referenced specification

Pass: No

Statement: - Trace spacing (post-processed data): ~30 m

- Vertical resolution: ~8.4 m

- Radar centre frequency: 150 MHz

- Radar bandwidth: 12 MHz

- Radar Receiver vertical sampling frequency: 22 MHz

- Absolute GPS positional accuracy: ~0.1 m (relative accuracy is one order of magnitude better). Banking angle was limited to 10 degrees during aircraft turns to avoid phase issues between GPS receiver and transmitter.

Crossover analysis of recovered bed elevation across the entire survey gives an error estimate for the PolarGAP survey of ~28 m.