Abstract
Abstract. Between January 2012 and June 2017 a small unmanned aerial system (sUAS), known as the Small Unmanned Meteorological Observer (SUMO), was used to observe the state of the atmospheric boundary layer in the Antarctic. During six Antarctic field campaigns, 116 SUMO flights were completed. These flights took place during all seasons over both permanent ice and ice-free locations on the Antarctic continent and over sea ice in the western Ross Sea. Sampling was completed during spiral ascent and descent flight paths that observed the temperature, humidity, pressure and wind up to 1000 m above ground level and sampled the entire depth of the atmospheric boundary layer, as well as portions of the free atmosphere above the boundary layer. A wide variety of boundary layer states were observed, including very shallow, strongly stable conditions during the Antarctic winter and deep, convective conditions over ice-free locations in the summer. The Antarctic atmospheric boundary layer data collected by the SUMO sUAS, described in this paper, can be retrieved from the United States Antarctic Program Data Center (https://www.usap-dc.org, last access: 8 March 2021). The data for all flights conducted on the continent are available at https://doi.org/10.15784/601054 (Cassano, 2017), and data from the Ross Sea flights are available at https://doi.org/10.15784/601191 (Cassano, 2019).
Highlights
The turbulent lower portion of the atmosphere, known as the atmospheric boundary layer, is the part of the atmosphere that interacts directly with the underlying surface
This paper describes the Small Unmanned Meteorological Observer (SUMO) small unmanned aerial system (sUAS) and flight strategy employed during our Antarctic field campaigns (Sect. 2) and the data processing and quality control applied to the data
This paper provides a description of all Antarctic SUMO unmanned aerial systems (UASs) flights that have been, or will be, conducted by our research group
Summary
The turbulent lower portion of the atmosphere, known as the atmospheric boundary layer, is the part of the atmosphere that interacts directly with the underlying surface. Our research group has used an deployed small UAS (sUAS) known as the Small Unmanned Meteorological Observer (SUMO) (Reuder et al, 2009) during six Antarctic field campaigns from 2012 through 2017. These SUMO campaigns have occurred on the Ross Ice Shelf near Ross Island and in the McMurdo Dry Valleys (Fig. 1) in the austral summer and late austral winter into early spring. Other flights occurred over the ice-free, complex terrain of the Wright Valley and over the sea ice of the Ross Sea. The data collected over these varied surfaces over the entire annual cycle provide observations of a wide range of Antarctic boundary layer conditions.
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