The meteorological and remote sensing operations of the British Antarctic Survey

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The meteorological and remote sensing operations
of the British Antarctic Survey

• Steve Colwell

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

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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 CT25 cloud base recorder at Halley and
  Rothera.

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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.

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Current remote sensing operations.

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

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ARIES

• Antarctic Reception of Imagery for Environmental
  Science
• Dundee HRPT system
• 2.4 m Dish
• Installed at Rothera in February 1993

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Hardware
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Electronics
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Dome
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Block Diagram
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Coverage
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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.
• 1.5TB of zipped data, 5TB if unzipped.

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Quick Looks

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

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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.

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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 dont want to duplicate what they have from
  Palmer at Scripps.

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• 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 2.4m 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.