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Processed airborne radio-echo sounding data for the Thwaites Glacier 2019 survey, West Antarctica (2019/2020)
GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01322

Summary

Abstract:
As part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) ~4432 km of new radar depth sounding data was acquired over the Thwaites Glacier catchment by the British Antarctic Survey. Data was collected using the PASIN-2 polametric radar system, fitted on the BAS aerogeophysical equipped survey aircraft "VP-FBL". The survey operated from Lower Thwaites Glacier camp, and focused on collecting data in regions of ice >1.5 km thick between 70 and 180 km from the grounding line. Additional profiles from the coast to the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) divide and over the eastern shear margin were also flown. Ice thicknesses between 418 and 3744 m were measured, with a minimum bed elevation of -2282 m imaged.

Our Twin Otter aircraft was equipped with dual-frequency carrier-phase GPS for navigation, radar altimeter for surface mapping, wing-tip magnetometers, an iMAR strapdown gravity system, 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.

Keywords:
Antarctica, Geophysics, ITGC, Radar, Thwaites Glacier, aerogeophysics, ice thickness, surface elevation

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Citation

Jordan, T., & Robinson, C. (2021). Processed airborne radio-echo sounding data for the Thwaites Glacier 2019 survey, West Antarctica (2019/2020) (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/e7aba676-1fdc-4c9a-b125-1ebe6124e5dc

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