Review article: 30 years of airborne radar surveys on the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets by the Alfred Wegener Institute

Abstract

The Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), has conducted airborne radar campaigns since 1994 across Antarctica and Greenland, utilizing six different radar systems to study ice sheets and their interactions with climate, ocean and the solid Earth. Over the past three decades, AWI has collected more than one million profile-kilometres of radar data, covering approximately one quarter of the Antarctic and the Greenland Ice Sheet, respectively. In this review article, we describe AWI's airborne radar systems and their deployments over the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheet. Moreover, we summarize application and usage of AWI's radar systems, which provided crucial insights into e.g., ice dynamics, mass balance, and ancient landscapes buried beneath the ice. The integration of radar data with other geophysical methods has enhanced bathymetric models, improving predictions of ice–ocean interactions and ice-shelf stability and contributed to a better understanding of crustal and geological evolution of the Antarctic continent. As part of this paper, and to support scientific progress, AWI made its airborne radar data publicly accessible through the Radar Data over Polar Ice Sheets viewer hosted by the Marine Data Portal and PANGAEA, ensuring compliance with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles. Future research will expand on these contributions, focusing on refining ice-sheet models and exploring new areas of glaciological and geological interest.