ICECAP Basal Interface Specularity Content Profiles: IPY and OIB

• Main Authors: Blankenship, Donald D., Greenbaum, Jamin, Roberts, Jason, Schroeder, Dustin, Siegert, Martin, Van Ommen, Tas, Young, Duncan A.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) Data Center 2020
• Subjects: Ice Penetrating Radar; Radar Echo Sounder; Subglacial Hydrology; Radar Echo Sounding; ICECAP; Cryosphere; Antarctica; East Antarctica; Antarc*; International Polar Year; IPY
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.15784/601371; https://www.usap-dc.org/view/dataset/601371

The International Collaborative Exploration of the Cryosphere though Airborne Profiling (ICECAP) collected five seasons of aerogeophysical data data through the NSFs International Polar Year and NASAs Operation Ice Bridge programs in East Antarctica, using the coherent HiCARS 60 MHz radar system. By comparing echo strengths for different focusing apertures, and accounting for the ranges and angles involved, we can derive the "specularity content" of the bed echo, a proxy for small scale bed roughness and a good indicator for subglacial water pressure in regions of distributed subglacial water (Schroeder et al., 2014, IEEE GRSL, 10.1109/LGRS.2014.2337878; IEEE; Dow et al., 2019, EPSL https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2019.115961). Specularity data are inherently noisy, so these products have been smoothed with a 1 km filter.