High resolved snow height measurements at Neumayer Station, Antarctica, 2013

Antarctica is a continent with a strong character. High wind speeds, very low temperatures and heavy snow storms. All these parameters are well known due to observations and measurements, but precipitation measurements are still rare because the number of manned stations is very limited in Antarctica.In such a polar snow region many wind driven phenomena associated with snow fall exist like snow drift, blowing snow or sastrugi. Snow drift is defined as a layer of snow formed by the wind during a snowstorm. The horizontal visibility is below eye level. Blowing snow is specified as an ensemble of snow particles raised by the wind to moderate or great heights above the ground; the horizontal visibility at eye level is generally very poor (National Snow And Ice Data Center (NSIDC), 2013). Sastrugi are complex, fragile and sharp ridges or grooves formed on land or over sea ice. They arise from wind erosion, saltation of snow particles and deposition. To get more details about these procedures better instruments than the conventional stake array are required.This small report introduces a new measuring technique and therefore offers a never used dataset of snow heights. It is very common to measure the snow height with a stake array in Antarctica (f.e. Neumayer Station, Kohnen Station) but not with a laser beam. Thus the idea was born to install a new instrument in December 2012 at Neumayer Station.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.831283
PID https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.43340.d001
Related Identifier IsPartOf https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.958970
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.831283
Provenance
Creator Raffel, Bonnie; König-Langlo, Gert ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven
Publication Year 2014
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 1262193 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-8.271 LON, -70.689 LAT); Ekström Ice Shelf
Temporal Coverage Begin 2013-01-01T00:00:27Z
Temporal Coverage End 2013-12-27T09:36:47Z