Quality-checked meteorological data from the Southern Ocean collected during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition from December 2016 to April 2017.

Dataset abstract

This dataset contains quality-checked meteorological observations of air temperature, relative humidity, dew point, barometric pressure and observations of downwelling solar radiation and ultraviolet radiation. Further it contains the wind speed and direction relative to the ship but not corrected for air-flow distortion, and translated into the earth reference frame. For each of these variables observations are available from a portside and starboard side sensor. The dataset also contains, cloud base height and sky cover at three levels measured with a Ceilometer.

As additional information the solar azimuth and altitude angle have been calculated for the ship’s position every five minutes and have been added as a one-minute time series using the nearest value. The ship’s position, heading, course and speed over ground are also provided.

The wind speed measurements were made at a height of approximately 30.5 meters above sea level. The measurement height of the temperature and humidity probes is 23.7 meters above sea level. The barometric pressure was measured at 20 meters above sea level.

The observations have been screened for implausible values and on some occasions despiking based on visual inspection and a rolling interquartile range filter have been applied. Solar radiation measurements are affected by shadowing of the ship, and the air temperature and humidity by the heating of air that passes over the ship. Masks are provided to flag affected observations. The wind speed readings are affected by airflow distortion and should be used with consideration until a dataset of corrected wind speeds is published. More details on airflow distortion can be requested from the contact person.

Dataset contents

• ACE_filtered_meteorological_data_1min.csv, data file, comma-separated values
• diff_TA1_TA3_WDR2_5min_1.png, metadata, portable network graphics
• ratio_SR1_SR3_solangle_5min_1.png, metadata, portable network graphics
• data_file_header.txt, metadata, text
• README.txt, metadata, text
• ace_filtered_meteorological_data_change_log.txt, metadata, text

Change log

v1.1 - The range check for skycover (SC) and cloudlevel (CL) was added to the quality-checking routines. 53 data points violated the range check for these variables: these have now been marked as NaN.

v1.0 - Initial release of verified meteorological data.

Dataset license

This meteorological dataset is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) whose full description can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/