British Antarctic Survey’s Aerogeophysics Data: Releasing 20 Years of
Radar, Magnetic and Gravity Data over Antarctica
Abstract
The UK Polar Data Centre (PDC, https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/uk-pdc/) is
the focal point for Antarctic environmental data management in the UK.
Part of the Natural Environmental Research Council’s (NERC) network of
environmental data centres and based at the British Antarctic Survey
(BAS), the PDC coordinates the management of polar data from UK-funded
research. In the last two years, the geophysics team at the PDC has made
significant progress to improve the management of BAS aerogeophysics
data, a challenging task considering that the British Antarctic Survey
is one of the largest acquisitors of airborne geophysics data over
Antarctica. In 2020, we published bedrock elevation data for fourteen
airborne radar surveys over the continent, and more than thirty airborne
gravity and magnetics datasets. This year, we will release large swaths
of processed airborne radar data collected by BAS since the early 2000s,
including extensive surveys over Pine Island (2004-05) and Thwaites
(2018-20) glaciers, as well as the large surveys covering the Wilkes
subglacial basin (2005-06) and the South Pole (2015-16), amongst others.
Considerable effort has been made to curate these datasets to make them
up-to-date and comply with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable
and Re-usable) principles. In doing so, we believe that these datasets
will be a valuable asset to future geophysical and glaciological studies
over the Antarctic. Our aim here is to show our progress in
re-processing and publishing these datasets and, for the first time,
showcase our new Polar Aerogeophysics Data Portal which will serve as a
user-friendly interface to discover and download the newly-published
aerogeophysics data deposited on BAS’s data catalogue.