Time series of temperature, conductivity and pressure from a recovered seal-tag in the Amundsen Sea

• Main Authors: Zheng, Yixi, Heywood, Karen, Webber, Ben, Stevens, David, Michael, Fedak
• Other Authors: Fedak, Michael, Wellner, Julia, Larter, Robert, Moss, Simon, Barham, Mark, Boehme, Lars, Bortolotto, Guilherme Augusto
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2024
• Subjects: Amundsen Sea; Edwards Islands; Elephant Seal; Ice Sheet; Pine Island Bay; Southern Elephant Seal; Thwaites Glacier
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10478506

This dataset is collected by a tag that was depolyed by a seal-tagging team onboard the RRS James Clark Ross, under the Ocean2ice project of the UK's Ice Sheet Stability Programme (Heywood et al. 2014). This tag (tag serial number: EM959; hereafter, EM959 for this tag) was attached to a male Southern Elephant Seal. EM959 was initially deployed on the Edwards Islands in Pine Island Bay, after which the instrumented seal moved west along the edge of the fast ice and grounded icebergs. This seal stayed in the southeastern corner of the Amundsen Sea Polynya from mid-February to mid-April (yearday 51.8-105.7). Thus, EM959 measured the upper-ocean properties of the Amundsen Sea Polynya continually for more than two months during austral autumn. In February 2020, another seal-tagging team onboard the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer, part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) expedition to the Amundsen Sea, serendipitously found and recovered EM959. We calibrated EM959 conductivity data against nearby ship-based CTD profiles (i.e. the seven CTD casts within 10 km and 5 days of EM959 observations) obtained on the iSTAR/Ocean2ice cruise in the Amundsen Sea in February 2014 (Heywood et al. 2016). In order to include a wide range of conductivity values in the calibration, we chose profiles that encompassed the modified Circumpolar Deep Water, i.e., we chose seal profiles with a maximum temperature > 0 ºC and extending below the pycnocline (depth > 800 m) and compared them with the closest CTD profile. We obtain one scaling factor for conductivity for each seal profile and then calculate the median scaling factor of 1.0018, which we recommend be applied to all seal profiles before calculating the salinity. Longitude and latitude were obtained via ARGOS every time when the seal surface from a dive and then linearly interpolated into continuous time series. Outliers in both salinity and temperature are present within this dataset. We highly recommend that anyone utilising this dataset conduct a thorough ...