Snow height on sea ice and sea ice drift from autonomous measurements from buoy 2018S59, deployed during POLARSTERN cruise PS111

• Main Authors: Arndt, Stefanie, Nicolaus, Marcel
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2019
• Subjects: 2018S59; ACROSS; Advanced Remote Sensing – Ground-Truth Demo and Test Facilities; autonomous platform; buoy; BUOY_SNOW; DATE/TIME; drift; LATITUDE; LONGITUDE; Pressure; atmospheric; Snow buoy; snow depth; Snow height; Temperature; air; technical; Weddell Sea; Antarc*; Antarctic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.905714; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.905714

Snow height was measured by the Snow Depth Buoy 2018S59, an autonomous platform, drifting on Antarctic sea ice, deployed during POLARSTERN cruise PS111. The resulting time series describes the evolution of snow depth as a function of place and time between 11 February 2018 and 25 April 2019 in sample intervals of 1 hour. The Snow Depth Buoy consists of four independent sonar measurements representing the area (approx. 10 m**2) around the buoy. The buoy was installed on multi year ice. In addition to snow depth, geographic position (GPS), barometric pressure, air temperature, and an internal ice temperature were measured. Negative values of snow height occur if surface ablation continues into the sea ice. Thus, these measurements describe the position of the sea ice surface relative to the original snow-ice interface. Differences between single sensors indicate small-scale variability of the snow pack around the buoy. The data set has been processed, including the removal of obvious inconsistencies (missing values). Records without any snow depth may still be used for sea ice drift analyses.