All processing described here was performed in ArcGIS Pro version 2.6.
A composite Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was created comprising of three datasets from the Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica v1.1: ‘REMA_100m_peninsula_dem_filled’, ‘REMA_100m_dem’ and ‘REMA_200m_dem_filled’. These DEMs were first converted from ellipsoidal height to height above EGM2008 geoid and then mosaicked together in respective order at 100 m spatial resolution. This 100 m DEM was smoothed by performing ‘Focal Statistics’ using a 3x3 cell size.
100 m contours were extracted and all contours with a height <1m were deleted, as well as erroneous offshore contours. All contour ‘dangles’ were identified and then fixed to create a continuous dataset. They were fixed either by interpreting the correct line from satellite imagery or from ‘Copernicus WorldDEM 90m’ contours. Such lines are attributed with ‘interpreted’ in the source field and should be treated with caution. In other locations where the contours significantly overlapped the coastline, contours were redrawn/interpreted to not go offshore. In certain locations, primarily some islands on the Antarctic Peninsula, REMA data was insufficient to produce contours. In these places, contours were produced from the ‘Copernicus WorldDEM 90m’ DEM and smoothed by 300 m using a PAEK smoothing algorithm. Contours for Peter I Øy were incorporated from the Norwegian Polar Institute Data at 100 m intervals. The source of every line is written in the attribute table.
All contours were merged together and lines <150 m in length were deleted. Further lines <1500 m were deleted in ‘non-mountainous’ regions, so as to avoid deleting small mountain peak contours but to still simplify the main dataset. These regions were interpreted manually using the hillshade of the DEM used to produce the contours.
Original DEM sources and citations:
REMA: Howat, I. M., Porter, C., Smith, B. E., Noh, M.-J., and Morin, P.: The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica, The Cryosphere, 13, 665-674, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-665-2019, 2019.
Copernicus WorldDEM: produced using Copernicus WorldDEM™-90 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved”.
Norwegian Polar Institute (2014). Map data / kartdata Peter I Øy 1:50 000 (P50 Kartdata). Norwegian Polar Institute. https://doi.org/10.21334/npolar.2014.29105abc