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 CT25 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.– 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.

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.

• 1.5TB of zipped data, 5TB if unzipped.

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

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 2.4m 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.