A 3D map of englacial attenuation rate from radar reflections at Law Dome, East Antarctica

• Other Authors: Abdul Salam, Syed (pointOfContact), Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), University of Tasmania (UTAS) (hasAssociationWith)
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of Tasmania, Australia
• Subjects: geoscientificInformation; attenuation; ice penetrating radar; Law Dome; GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS; EARTH SCIENCE; CRYOSPHERE; GLACIAL MEASUREMENTS; CLIMATE INDICATORS; CRYOSPHERIC INDICATORS; Environmental Monitoring; ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT; Climate Change Processes; EARTH SCIENCES; ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES; Glaciology; PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL GEOSCIENCE; Antarctic; East Antarctica; East Antarctic Ice Sheet; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice cap; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelf; Totten Ice Shelf
• Online Access: https://researchdata.ands.org.au/3d-map-englacial-east-antarctica/1447472; http://metadata.imas.utas.edu.au:/geonetwork/srv/en/metadata.show?uuid=01b862fd-6f8d-4d9a-8bd8-ad8567e498d9

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is the largest source of potential sea-level rise, containing some 19 m of sea-level equivalent. One of the well-investigated regions in East Antarctica is Law Dome, which is a small independent ice cap situated to the west of Totten Ice Shelf. The ice cap is slow-moving, has a low melt-rate at the surface and moderate wind speeds, making it a useful study site for our investigations. Radar data from Investigating the Cryospheric Evolution of the Central Antarctic Plate (ICECAP) project has good coverage over this area. A new method is proposed for the estimation of attenuation rate from radar data which is mathematically modeled as a constrained regularised l2 minimization problem. In the proposed method, only radar data is required and the englacial reflectors are automatically detected from the radar data itself. A final product of 3D attenuation rates and 3D samples count is provided for the research community in this data set. This attenuation rate data set is obtained by detecting internal reflectors and estimating attenuation within ice using radar data from Investigating the Cryospheric Evolution of the Central Antarctic Plate (ICECAP ) project (https://nsidc.org/data/IR1HI1B/versions/1 and https://nsidc.org/data/IR2HI1B/versions/1) at Law Dome, East Antarctica. The englacial layers are detected with a minimum 60 m spacing between the layers and the attenuation rate is estimated using a mathematical model of constrained optimization. After the estimation of the radar attenuation, the data is post-processed to enhance the quality of the data. In the post-processing step, a 3D grid of 1 km x 1km x 60 m dimension is developed. As the flight lines in the original data provide dense coverage so each grid cell contains many samples (the median is selected among these samples). A second 3D grid is also generated which contains the values that how many samples are contributing to the corresponding grid cell of attenuation rate.