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British Antarctic Survey’s Aerogeophysics Data: Releasing 20 Years of Radar, Magnetic and Gravity Data over Antarctica
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  • Julien Bodart,
  • Alice Fremand,
  • Tom Jordan,
  • Fausto Ferraccioli,
  • Carl Robinson,
  • David Vaughan,
  • Hugh Corr
Julien Bodart
NERC British Antarctic Survey

Corresponding Author:julien.bodart@ed.ac.uk

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Alice Fremand
NERC British Antarctic Survey
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Tom Jordan
NERC British Antarctic Survey
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Fausto Ferraccioli
NERC British Antarctic Survey
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Carl Robinson
NERC British Antarctic Survey
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David Vaughan
NERC British Antarctic Survey
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Hugh Corr
NERC British Antarctic Survey
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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.