Advancing polar airborne geophysics data management at the UK Polar Data Centre

In the last 50 years, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS, https://www.bas.ac.uk/) has been a key player in acquiring airborne magnetic, gravity and radio-echo sounding data in Antarctica. These data have been central to many studies of the past, present and future evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet but until recently they were not accessible to the community.

In the last three years, the UK Polar Data Centre (https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/uk-pdc/) has made considerable efforts to standardise these datasets to comply with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data principles and develop the Polar Airborne Geophysics Data Portal (https://www.bas.ac.uk/project/nagdp/). Workflows from collection to publication have been updated, data formats standardised, and Jupyter Notebooks created to improve reuse and comply with the needs of the scientific community [1].

Following this experience and to promote open access, the UK Polar Data Centre led the management of 60 years of international Antarctic ice thickness data through the Bedmap3 project (https://www.bas.ac.uk/project/bedmap/), an international project supported by the Scientific Committee of Antarctic Science. This time, it’s 80+ million points of ice thickness, ice surface and bed elevation from 270+ surveys collected from 50+ international partners that have been standardised and assimilated in the Bedmap data portal (https://bedmap.scar.org/) [2].

Today, airborne data are acquired using new types of platforms including uncrewed aerial systems (UAV) adding new challenges and opportunities to set up new standards and data management practices.

As part of this presentation, we will present the different workflows and data management practices that we are developing to make Antarctic science open and FAIR.

[1] Frémand, A. C., Bodart, J. A., Jordan, T. A., Ferraccioli, F., Robinson, C., Corr, H. F. J., Peat, H. J., Bingham, R. G., and Vaughan, D. G.: British Antarctic Survey's aerogeophysical data: releasing 25 years of airborne gravity, magnetic, and radar datasets over Antarctica, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 3379–3410, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-3379-2022 , 2022.

[2] Frémand, A. C., Fretwell, P., Bodart, J., Pritchard, H. D., Aitken, A., Bamber, J. L., ... & Zirizzotti, A.: Antarctic Bedmap data: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) sharing of 60 years of ice bed, surface, and thickness data, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 2695–2710, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-2695-2023, 2023.