In situ Lagrangian drifting buoy data off East Antarctica for the austral spring of 2012, deployed during the SIPEX II voyage of the Aurora Australis

In situ Lagrangian drifter positions were collected from nine expendable sea-ice buoys. Positions were collected by GPS receivers aboard each buoy and relayed via the CLS Argos satellite data system.The scientific proposal for this project was based on the deployment of two meso-scale buoy arrays over the continental shelf break in the SIPEX 2012 experimental region. Resolving of ice motion over the continental shelf and the shelf break is expected to provide crucial information on sea-ice deformation and ice strength. However, due to the unfavourable cruise track and also due to operational issues with helicopter support, it was not possible to deploy any of the meso-scale buoy arrays. Instead buoys were deployed to resolve ice deformation within the wider SIPEX 2012 region. Position data are available hourly from most buoys. CLS Argos transmitted data suffer from a data transmission blackspot just prior to local none, when there will be no data available.Data processing will be carried out as described in Heil et al. [2008]The dataset is build from ASCII files for each buoy with time stamps and observed latitude and longitude. The format (by column [C] for each file is as following: C1: Program IDC2: Buoy IDC3: YearC4: MonthC5: DayC6: HourC7: MinuteC8: SecondC9: Day-of-yearC10: Lat (degN)C11: Lon (degE)