GlacioBasis Zackenberg - Level 1 data 2008 - 2022

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The GlacioBasis Zackenberg glaciological monitoring programme, is a subprogram of the Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring (GEM, g-e-m.dk) at Zackenberg Research station, NE Greenland.

The data presented here is from a transect of three Automatic Ablation and Weather Stations (AAWSs) located on the A. P. Olsen ice cap (referred to here as APO or the Ice Cap), located in the hydrologocal catchment of Zackenberg River. The first two AAWSs of the APO transect were installed in April 2008 in the ablation zone, and the third AAWS was installed in August 2009 in the accumulation zone at the Ice Cap summit. These AAWSs have been running with alternating instrumentation until April 2022. In spring 2022 installation of new standardized AAWSs was initiated, these stations are similar to the PROMICE and GC-Net stations (Fausto and others, 2021). With the new standardized setup, the data from the APO transect will be handled as a PROMICE and GC-Net dataset and data processing will be done using the python package pypromice described in How and others (2023).

The continuation of this dataset from the A. P. Olsen transect can be found as part of the PROMICE and GC-Net automated weather station data in Greenland: https://doi.org/10.22008/FK2/IW73UU as well as in the GEM database: https://data.g-e-m.dk/ which is updated once a year in spring.

The variables published here are: Ice ablation, air temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, wind speed, incoming and outgoing shortwave and longwave radiation as well as AAWS tilt, snow depth and the derived variables cloud cover fraction, surface temperature and albedo.

References: Fausto, R. S., As, D. V., Mankoff, K. D., Vandecrux, B., Citterio, M., Ahlstrøm, A. P., Andersen, S. B., Colgan, W., Karlsson, N. B., Kjeldsen, K. K., Korsgaard, N. J., Larsen, S. H., Nielsen, S., Pedersen, A., Shields, C. L., Solgaard, A. M., and Box, J. E.: Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) automatic weather station data, Earth System Science Data, 13, 3819–3845, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-3819-2021, 2021.

How, P. R., Wright, P. J., Mankoff, K. D., Vandecrux, B., Fausto, R. S., and Ahlstrøm, A. P.: pypromice: A Python package for processing automated weather station data, Journal of Open Source Software, 8, 5298, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05298, 2023.

The level 1 data is provided with two different headers. One file type with the newly described csv-compatible NEAD format. The files compatible with NEAD have a filename extesion "_nead". The NEAD format is a csv file with added metadata header. The format is documented at https://doi.org/10.16904/envidat.187 and a python package is available to read and write NEAD files: https://github.com/GEUS-Glaciology-and-Climate/pyNEAD.

After installing the NEAD package into python the data can be imported like this:

import nead
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
filename = 'ZAC_L_nead.csv'
ds = nead.read(filename, index_col=0)
# Ignoring all metadata and plotting
df = ds.to_pandas()
df.plot(subplots = True)
plt.show()

In case using NEAD is not wanted, data with a single line header can be imported to python like this:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
filename = 'ZAC_L.csv'
df = pd.read_csv(filename, index_col = 0, parse_dates = True)
df.plot(subplots=True)
plt.show()