Sailbuoy Iskant PolarFront EK80 echosounder data 2021-05 to 2021-07

PolarFront 2021 sailbuoy Iskant EK80

During the arctic spring of 2021, the autonomous sailbuoy Iskant was on a 2-month long-endurance field campaign in the Barents Sea, for the PolarFront research project.

Equipped with a broadband echosounder (SIMRAD EK80 WBT Mini), the sailbuoy captured 5600 acoustic segments, each holding 5 minutes of data (Dunn, 2022). The EK80 data is published in a collection of 12 datasets with a combined size of ~500GB.

This dataset contains vehicle GPS positions/data logs, EK80 calibration file, a machine-readable list of the datasets, as well as documentation for the entire collection.

Time coverage: 2021-05-16/2021-07-13.

Datasets
List of PolarFront EK80 datasets from Sailbuoy Iskant in 2021:

• 2021-05-16/2021-05-21
• 2021-05-22/2021-05-26
• 2021-05-27/2021-05-31
• 2021-06-01/2021-06-05
• 2021-06-06/2021-06-10
• 2021-06-11/2021-06-15
• 2021-06-16/2021-06-20
• 2021-06-21/2021-06-25
• 2021-06-26/2021-06-30
• 2021-07-01/2021-07-05
• 2021-07-06/2021-07-10
• 2021-07-11/2021-07-13

Data access
The most reliable method to obtain data of this size is to use a tool supporting resumable downloads from a list of file URLs. 

For each dataset, the file URLs are available via the Zenodo API using the numeric identifier found in the DOI suffix, eg. https://zenodo.org/api/records/7463348.

Data parsing and interoperability
The EK80 data is distributed in the original, proprietary data format. There is an ogoing effort in the international acoustic data community to standardise the data analysis of echosounder data, see: https://github.com/ices-publications/SONAR-netCDF4.

In order to obtain the position corresponding to a echosounder file, use the UTC timestamp found in the filename and match it against the timestamps before and after each EK80 data capture, as found in WBT.TXT:

Sensorlog opened 16.05.2021 14:01:12 GPS: 16.05.2021 14:01:12 76.76513 29.94313
Sensorlog closed 16.05.2021 14:11:45 GPS: 16.05.2021 14:11:45 76.76299 29.96182

References

Dunn M (2022). Overview of Sailbuoy EK80 data from 2021 cruise at the polar front. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6627220

@todo 2021 Cruise Report