Southern Ocean Depth and Temperature Profiles from Airborne Sensors

AXBT and AXCTD sensors were deployed from a Basler aircraft into narrow sea ice leads in East Antarctica between 2016 and 2018. The project was a prototype demonstration by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and the Antarctic Gateway Partnership. Data includes position metadata and ocean profile measurements.

Use Cases

• Infer seafloor depth from AXCTD conductivity profiles in regions without ship-based surveys.
• Detect major thermoclines using AXBT temperature profile data to analyze ocean state.
• Map sensor deployment locations using GPX files containing aircraft latitude, longitude, and elevation.
• Analyze temporal patterns by combining profile data with metadata date and time fields.
• Study operational feasibility of airborne deployments using season identifier and flight number metadata.

Strengths

• Data spans two field seasons (2016-2017 and 2017-2018) for temporal comparison.
• Provides data in multiple formats (GPX, ASCII EDF, HDF5) for different analysis tools.
• Focuses on a specific, hard-to-survey region: narrow sea ice leads in East Antarctica.

Limitations

• Project scope was limited as a prototype demonstration, suggesting constrained data volume.
• Data collection was an unfunded 'target of opportunity', potentially affecting consistency.
• Specific row counts, column counts, and file sizes are unknown from the description.

Provenance

Source

AU_AADC (Australian Antarctic Data Centre), sourced from NASA EarthData.

Collection Method

Deployed from a BT-67 Basler aircraft using Airborne Expendable Bathy-Thermograph (AXBT) and Conductivity, Temperature, Depth (AXCTD) sensors.

Time Range

2016-2018

Freshness

null

Geography

Southern Ocean, specifically East Antarctica and narrow sea ice leads.