Precipitation at Dumont d'Urville, Adélie Land, East Antarctica: the APRES3 field campaigns dataset

Abstract

Compared to the other continents and lands, Antarctica suffers from a severe shortage of in situ observations of precipitation. APRES3 (Antarctic Precipitation, Remote Sensing from Surface and Space) is a program dedicated to improving the observation of Antarctic precipitation, both from the surface and from space, to assess climatologies and evaluate and ameliorate meteorological and climate models. A field measurement campaign was deployed at Dumont d'Urville station at the coast of Adélie Land in Antarctica, with an intensive observation period from November 2015 to February 2016 using X-band and K-band radars, a snow gauge, snowflake cameras and a disdrometer, followed by continuous radar monitoring through 2016 and beyond. Among other results, the observations show that a significant fraction of precipitation sublimates in a dry surface katabatic layer before it reaches and accumulates at the surface, a result derived from profiling radar measurements. While the bulk of the data analyses and scientific results are published in specialized journals, this paper provides a compact description of the dataset now archived in the PANGAEA data repository (https://www.pangaea.de, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.883562) and made open to the scientific community to further its exploitation for Antarctic meteorology and climate research purposes.