Radar and ground-level measurements of clouds and precipitation collected during the POPE 2020 campaign at Princess Elisabeth Antarctica

Abstract

The datasets presented in this article were collected during a 4-month measurement campaign at the Belgian research base Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA). The campaign, named PEA Orographic Precipitation Experiment (POPE), was conducted by the Environmental Remote Sensing Laboratory of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, with the logistical support of the International Polar Foundation, between the end of November 2019 and the beginning of February 2020. The datasets have been collected at five different sites. A W-band Doppler cloud profiler and a multi-angle snowflake camera (MASC) have been deployed in the immediate proximity of the main building of the station. An X-band dual-polarization Doppler scanning weather radar was installed 1.9 km southeast of PEA. Information on the various hydrometeor types have been derived from its measurements and from the images collected by the MASC. The remaining three sites were located in a transect across the mountain chain south of the base, between 7 and 17 km apart from each other. At each site, a K-band Doppler profiler and an automated weather station have been deployed. A pyrgeometer and a pyranometer accompanied the instruments at the site in the middle of the transect. The radar variables and the measurements collected by the weather stations and radiometers are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7428690 (Ferrone and Berne, 2023c). The Doppler spectra are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7507087 (Ferrone and Berne, 2023a) and https://doi.org/10.5075/epfl-lte-299685 (Ferrone and Berne, 2023b). A case study, covering the precipitation event recorded on 23 December 2019, is presented to illustrate the various datasets. Overall, the availability of radar measurements over a complex terrain, relatively far from a scientific base, is extremely rare in the Antarctic context and opens a wide range of possibilities for precipitation studies over the region.