Gridded airborne laserscanner (ALS) elevation data (L4) for three flights during MOSAiC (prerelease)

An integrated sensor platform including an inertial navigation system (INS) and a commercial (Riegl VQ580) airborne laser scanner (ALS) among other sensor was mounted in the cargo compartment in one of the Polarstern helicopters (D-HARK) during MOSAiC. This sensor combinations allows for a precise mapping of the snow and sea-ice surface around Polarstern at submeter-scale resolution. Information from the ALS data includes the elevation of the snow or ice surface and surface reflectivity at the near-infrared wavelength. From the more than 60 flights acquired between October 2019 and September 2020 we prerelease with this gridded data-set three flights for quality-control and test purposes by potential end users. The geographical coordinates of the data have been corrected for the drift of the sea-ice cover during each survey flight and the elevation bias has been corrected based on overlapping flight transects.

Flight dates (Device Operation):

• Oct. 2, 2019 (PS122/1_2-57)
• Apr 8, 2020 (PS122/3_35-49)
• July 22, 2020 (PS122/4_48-69)

Variables (file format: netCDF version 4 and geotiffs):

• Elevation: elevation of the sea ice or snow surface above WGS84 ellipsoid
• Reflectance: range corrected target echo amplitude
• Echo Width: width of the target echo return (full width at half maximum)

Project

ALS and INS data was collected as part of the international Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of the Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) with the tag MOSAiC20192020 and the Project_ID: AWI_PS122_00. Data processing and analysis is funded by the BMBF IceSense (03F0866A) project.