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Solid precipitation measurements in Antarctica are crucial as snowfall represents the main water input term for the polar cap, and its probable increase in the coming century can mitigate sea-level rise caused by global warming. This paper presents 7 years of Micro Rain Radar (Metek MRR-2) data at the Dumont d'Urville station in coastal Adélie Land, East Antarctica. Statistics are calculated on 3 radar variables (equivalent reflectivity, mean Doppler velocity and signal-to-noise ratio) to outline the main characteristics of the radar dataset. Seasonal and interannual variabilities are also investigated, but no significant temporal trends are detected except for the seasonal mean Doppler velocity which is higher in summer and lower in winter. We then use the snowfall rate (S) data from a colocated snow-gauge to estimate the MRR precipitation profile from the radar equivalent reflectivity (Ze) through a locally derived Ze-S relation. We find the relation Ze = 43.3 S0.88. The processing method used to obtain this relation, data quality and uncertainty considerations are discussed in the manuscript. In order to give an example of application of the dataset, a brief statistical comparison of the MRR precipitation rate along the vertical with model data from the ERA5 reanalysis and the LMDZ climate model is performed, and notably shows that models underestimate heavy precipitation events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 50 years, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has been one of the major acquirers of aerogeophysical data over Antarctica, providing scientists with gravity, magnetic and radar datasets that have been central to many studies of the past, present, and future evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Until recently, many of these datasets were unpublished in full, restricting further usage of the data for different applications such as gravity inversions, bed-reflectivity analysis, and englacial-layer tracking. Starting in 2020, scientists and data managers at the British Antarctic Survey have worked on standardising and releasing large swaths of aerogeophysical data acquired during the period 1994-2020, including a total of 64 datasets from 24 different surveys, amounting to ~450,000 line-km (or 5.3 million km²) of data across West Antarctica, East Antarctica, and the Antarctic Peninsula. Amongst these are the extensive surveys over the fast-changing Pine Island (BBAS 2004-05) and Thwaites (ITGC 2018-20) glacier catchments, and the first ever surveys of the Wilkes Subglacial Basin (WISE-ISODYN 2005-06) and Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains (AGAP 2007-09). Considerable effort has been made to standardise these datasets to comply with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-Usable) data principles, as well as to create the Polar Airborne Geophysics Data Portal (https://www.bas.ac.uk/project/nagdp/), which serves as a user-friendly interface to interact with and download the newly published data. This paper reviews how these datasets were acquired and processed, presents the methods used to standardise them, and introduces the new data-portal infrastructure and interactive tutorials that were created to improve the accessibility of the data. Lastly, we exemplify future potential uses of the datasets by extracting information on the continuity of englacial layering from the fully processed radar data. We believe this newly released data will be a valuable asset to future geophysical and glaciological studies over Antarctica and will extend significantly the life cycle of the data. All datasets included in this data release are now fully accessible at: https://data.bas.ac.uk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is the largest source of potential sea-level rise, containing approximately 52 m of sea-level equivalent. To constrain estimates of sea-level rise into the future requires knowledge of ice-sheet properties and geometry and ice-penetrating radar offers a means to estimate these properties (e.g. ice thickness, englacial temperatures). One of the regions that have been extensively surveyed using ice-penetrating radar from the Investigating the Cryospheric Evolution of the Central Antarctic Plate (ICECAP) project in East Antarctica is Law Dome, a small independent ice cap situated to the west of Totten Ice Shelf. The ice cap is slow-moving, has a low melt-rate at the surface and moderate wind speeds, making it a useful study site for estimating the radar attenuation. A new method is proposed for the estimation of attenuation rate from radar data which is mathematically modelled as a constrained regularised l2 minimisation problem. In the proposed method, only radar data is required and the englacial reflectors are automatically detected from the radar data itself. To validate our methodology, attenuation differences at flight crossover points are calculated and statistical analyses performed to assess the accuracy of the results. For spatial analyses, the errors are of the order 22.6 %, 15.2 %, and 32.8 % for mean absolute error, median absolute error, and root mean square error respectively. Also, for the depth analyses, up to the depth of 800 m, the errors are under 29.9 %, 24.2 %, and 38.8 % for mean absolute error, median absolute error, and root mean square error respectively. A final product of 3D attenuation rates and uncertainty estimates is provided. The generated dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.25959/5e6851e266f4a (Abdul Salam, 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]