The meteorological and remote sensing operations of the

The meteorological and remote sensing operations of the British Antarctic Survey Steve Colwell

• • • BAS stations. Operational meteorology. Current forecasting facilities at Rothera. Current remote sensing operations. The ARIES system at Rothera. Future developments at Rothera.

Operational Meteorology • 3 Hourly synoptic program at Halley and Rothera, hourly if in support of aircraft operations. • AWS at Bird Island, South Georgia and Fossil Bluff. • Daily radio-sonde launch at Halley and Rothera. • WIVIS present weather and visibility detector at Rothera. • Vaisala CT 25 cloud base recorder at Halley and Rothera.

Forecasting facilities at Rothera • Meteorological observers at station. • HRPT satellite receiver for images and AWS data. • GTS synoptic data sent from Cambridge. • UKMO GRIB charts. • AMPS charts. • Horace system.

Current remote sensing operations. • Dartcom HRPT receivers at Halley, South Georgia and on the 2 ships. – 46 cm flat panel antenna. – active-stabilisation. – Front end false colour display software. • Dundee HRPT receiver at Rothera. • Only data collected at Rothera is currently archived.

ARIES • Antarctic Reception of Imagery for Environmental Science • Dundee HRPT system • 2. 4 m Dish • Installed at Rothera in February 1993

Hardware

Electronics

Dome

Block Diagram

Coverage

Data Archive • One DAT tape every day from February 1993 to February 1999. Only one copy made. • Then DLT tapes – two per month. Two copies made. • All data now stored on spinning disk at BAS. • 1. 5 TB of zipped data, 5 TB if unzipped.

Quick Looks • Reprojected IR channel at a scale of 8 km per pixel. • Paper copy until 2000 • JPEG stored from January 1994 • JPEGs put into MDMS

Software (Cambridge) • Use IDL routines for reprojection and display • Now able to process large number of passes automatically from disk. • Still takes a fairly long time – 1 month of data per day. • The software is not very user friendly.

The Future • Horace system is now capable of ingesting the images once they have been converted into Autosat format, this need to be automated. • A bid is in place to give a copy of the ARIES archive to PML who have a department setup to process the images and produce usable products. • We don’t want to duplicate what they have from Palmer at Scripps.

• There is an operational requirement at Rothera to have real-time satellite data stream and this can only be achieved by having a ground-station at Rothera. • The choices are. – Install a new X-band satellite receiver station. – Utilise the existing hardware as far as possible as the 2. 4 m dish has proved very reliable over the past 10 years. – Stick with current HRPT reception and download X-band products from the internet as and when available.