Post on 06-Jan-2016
description
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.