Gridded airborne laserscanner (ALS) elevation data (L4) for three flights during MOSAiC (prerelease)

An integrated sensor platform including an inertial navigation system (INS) and a commercial (Riegl VQ580) airborne laser scanner (ALS) among other sensor was mounted in the cargo compartment in one of the Polarstern helicopters (D-HARK) during MOSAiC. This sensor combinations allows for a precise mapping of the snow and sea-ice surface around Polarstern at submeter-scale resolution. Information from the ALS data includes the elevation of the snow or ice surface and surface reflectivity at the near-infrared wavelength. From the more than 60 flights acquired between October 2019 and September 2020 we prerelease with this gridded data-set three flights for quality-control and test purposes by potential end users. The geographical coordinates of the data have been corrected for the drift of the sea-ice cover during each survey flight and the elevation bias has been corrected based on overlapping flight transects. <em>Flight dates (Device Operation):</em> Oct. 2, 2019 (PS122/1_2-57) Apr 8, 2020 (PS122/3_35-49) July 22, 2020 (PS122/4_48-69) <em>Variables (file format: netCDF version 4 and geotiffs):</em> <strong>Elevation:</strong> elevation of the sea ice or snow surface above WGS84 ellipsoid <strong>Reflectance:</strong> range corrected target echo amplitude <strong>Echo Width:</strong> width of the target echo return (full width at half maximum) <em>Project</em> ALS and INS data was collected as part of the international Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of the Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) with the tag MOSAiC20192020 and the Project_ID: AWI_PS122_00. Data processing and analysis is funded by the BMBF IceSense (03F0866A) project.