Processed airborne radio-echo sounding data from the IMAFI survey covering the Institute and Moller ice streams and the Patriot Hills, West Antarctica (2010/2011)

An airborne radar survey was flown over the Institute and Moller ice streams in the Weddell Sea sector of West Antarctica in the austral summer of 2010/11 as part of the Institute-Moller Antarctic Funding Initiative (IMAFI) project (grant reference number: NE/G013071/1). This project was a NERC Antarctic Funding Initiative (AFI) collaborative project between the British Antarctic Survey and the Universities of Edinburgh, York, Aberdeen and Exeter with the aim to test the hypothesis that the Institute and Moller ice streams are underlain by weak marine sediments which control the flow of the overlying ice. Operating from two static field camps close to the ice divide between the Institute and Moller ice streams and Patriot Hills, we collected ~25,000 km of airborne radio-echo sounding data across 28 survey lines. Our aircraft was equipped with dual-frequency carrier-phase GPS for navigation, radar altimeter for surface mapping, wing-tip magnetometers, a LaCoste and Romberg air-sea gravimeter, and an ice-sounding radar system (PASIN). 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.

Ross, N., Bingham, R., Ferraccioli, F., Jordan, T., Le Brocq, A., Rippin, D., & Siegert, M. (2021). Processed airborne radio-echo sounding data from the IMAFI survey covering the Institute and Moller ice streams and the Patriot Hills, West Antarctica (2010/2011) (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/f32b298b-7906-4360-9e34-16739af73bb7