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

<p>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.&nbsp;From the more than 60 flights acquired between October 2019 and September&nbsp;2020&nbsp;we prerelease with this gridded data-set three flights&nbsp;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.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Flight dates (Device Operation):</em></p> <ul> <li>Oct. 2, 2019 (PS122/1_2-57)</li> <li>Apr 8, 2020 (PS122/3_35-49)</li> <li>July 22, 2020 (PS122/4_48-69)</li> </ul> <p><em>Variables (file format: netCDF version 4 and geotiffs):</em></p> <ul> <li><strong>Elevation:</strong>&nbsp;elevation of the sea ice or snow surface above WGS84 ellipsoid</li> <li><strong>Reflectance:</strong>&nbsp;range corrected target echo amplitude</li> <li><strong>Echo Width:</strong>&nbsp;width of the target echo return (full width at half maximum)</li> </ul> <p><em>Project</em></p> <p>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.&nbsp;</p>