Fuchs, Lea Tabea Antonia; Reppert, Valerie; Eisen, Olaf: Accumulation stake readings in western Dronning Maud Land (Antarctica) along the Neumayer-Kottas-Kohnen traverse 2021 to 2022 [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.996351 (dataset in review),

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In: Eisen, Olaf; Oerter, Hans; Mengert, Melissa; Valero Delgado, Fernando; Fuchs, Lea Tabea Antonia (2024): Accumulation stake line readings Neumayer-Kottas-Kohnen [dataset publication series]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.965319

This data collection contains readings of accumulation stakes along the approximately 420 km long traverse route from Neumayer Station towards Kottas Camp, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica. Stake readings were conducted approximately every year starting from austral summer 2014/15 to 2025/26. During the field campaigns in austral summer 2015/16, 2018/19, 2021/22 the traverse was further continued until Kohnen station, covering approximately 750 km. No measurements could be carried out in autumn summer 2016/17 and 2020/21. From Neumayer station to Kottas Camp stakes were deployed at approximately a 500 m interval. As the spatial variation of accumulation on the polar plateau is smaller than in the lower foreland (in this case the Ritscherflya), the stake distance was increased to 1 km to several kilometers from Kottas camp to Kohnen station. Positions were measured with a simple GPS with coarse acquisition accuracy (order of several meters to tens of meters), which is sufficiently accurate to separate different stake locations (usually 500 m apart and horizontal displacement smaller than about 200 m/a, with largest displacements on the Ekström ice shelf). The readings were performed by a dedicated two to three person team taking a simple measurement of the visible length of the stake above the snow surface. For tilted stakes, the vertical height above the surface as well as the length of the stake was measured. New stakes were deployed when less than about 1.5 m of the previous stake was visible or a stake was lost (e.g. from breaking off or falling over and finally getting burried in snow). Consequently, at some locations more than one stake is visible for several years (e.g. when the average snow accumulation was rather low). In those cases all visible stakes were recorded at the same location of such a stake cluster and added to the record as single entries. Additional field comments and field metadata as stake tilt made by observing personal were removed from the files. Besides longitude and latitude the files include northing and easting of the measurements. By comparing the readings of an individual stake in two different observation campaigns the amount of surface accumulation (i.e. snow deposition) or erosion (e.g. from sublimation of wind scour) can be determined. Although surface accumulation is still one of the major unknowns to determine the the total surface mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet, especially under climate change, direct long-term observations of surface accumulation are still one of the major gaps in field observations (Eisen et al., 2008). This time series of stake readings provides the basis for calculating the change in accumulation in space and time (e.g. Rotschky et al., 2007). It is thus fundamental for a decade-long record of the spatio-temporal characteristics of surface accumulation, which can be put into context to meteorological and oceanographic changes in the region.