Wave-Ice interactions and ice break-up observations in the Southern Ocean, 2020

Data was obtained using Spotter wave buoys (Sofar Ocean Technologies), hereafter wave buoys, and open-source ice motion loggers, hereafter ice buoys. Instrumentation was deployed on top of the sea ice with the main motivation to measure its vertical motion due to ocean waves. The wave buoys 3-axis measure motion at 2.5 Hz through GPS and have an accuracy of approximately 2 cm for the significant wave height.

The ice buoys measure motion in 9-degrees-of-freedom at 10Hz using a VectorNAV VN-100 IMU, accuracy is O(mm) for short waves and O(cm) for long waves. Both instruments also record their geographical location through GPS. Full time series of their motion is processed on board and summaries are send through Iridium.

For the wave buoy, this occurred at an interval of 30 minutes. For the ice buoy this occurred every 3 hours. In the dataset, WB and IB are abbreviations for wave buoy and ice buoy, respectively.

This dataset covers 2-8 January 2020 for the Antarctic campaign (WB1, WB2, IB1, IB2) and 14-28 March for the Arctic campaign (IB3, IB4, IB5) and includes significant wave height, peak period and the geographical coordinates of the instrumentation. ‘Hs’ refers to significant wave height (in meters). ‘Tp’ refers to peak period (in seconds). Time is in UTC, and in Matlab’s datenum format (i.e. the number of days since year 0000).

The geographical coordinates ‘lat’ and ‘lon’ (latitude and longitude, respectively) are in degrees. Note, as the ice buoys transmit the GPS coordinates and wave data in separate data messages, for the ice buoys ‘time’ refers to the reference time of the wave properties Hs and Tp, whereas ‘time_latlon’ refers to the reference time of the geographical coordinates. For the wave buoy, all data is transmitted in one message.