Snow height on sea ice and sea ice drift from autonomous measurements from buoy 2014S25, deployed during a Buoy comparison Project

Snow height was measured by the Snow Depth Buoy 2014S25, an autonomous platform, installed on land-fast sea ice off Barrow, Alaska during a Buoy comparison Project. The resulting time series describes the evolution of snow height as a function of place and time between 28 Sep 2014 and 27 Aug 2015 in sample intervals of 1 hour. The Snow Depth Buoy consists of four independent sonar measurements representing the area (approx. 10 m**2) around the buoy. In addition to snow height, geographic position (GPS), barometric pressure, air temperature, and an internal ice temperature were measured. Negative values of snow height occur if surface ablation continues into the sea ice. Thus, these measurements describe the position of the sea ice surface relative to the original snow-ice interface. Differences between single sensors indicate small-scale variability of the snow pack around the buoy. The data set has been processed, including the removal of obvious inconsistencies (missing values). Records without any snow height may still be used for sea ice drift analyses. Note: This data set contains only relative changes in snow depth, because no initial readings of absolute snow depth are available. This data set is strongly affected by local installations.