IMAS Metadata Catalogue
Antarctic marginal ice zone width data from AltiKa
These data underpin the Fraser et al., 2026 publication in Nature Communications: "Revealing the Antarctic marginal ice zone: a decade-long wave-in-ice climatology". They are presented as one .csv file per year, each containing around 8500-9000 rows. Each row corresponds to the data retrieved from a SARAL half-orbit (pole to pole). Each row presents the along-track summary fields used to estimate the wave-affected marginal ice zone width. The marginal ice zone width is estimated from the difference in latitude between the ice edge and the latitude of the "inner MIZ limit". The inner MIZ limit is estimated from AltiKa Ka-band radar altimeter waveforms: where the waveform of returned power becomes suffiently peaky and "steep", we interpret this as being the point where wave passage becomes undetectable.
Simple
Identification info
- Date (Publication)
- 2026-04-10T00:00:00
Identifier
Resource provider
Author
Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), University of Tasmania (UTAS) - Fraser, Alexander
Private Bag 129
Hobart
TAS
7001
Australia
- Credit
- This project received grant funding from the Australian Research Council, through grants FT230100234, LP170101090, LE220100103, FT190100404, DP240100325 and DP240100325. This project received grant funding from the Australian Government as part of the Antarctic Science Collaboration Initiative program. This work contributes to delivering the Australian Antarctic Science Decadal Strategy. The authors acknowledge the generous support of the Harris Charitable Trust through the Antarctic Science Foundation. This work contributes to Australian Antarctic Science Project 4506, 4625 and 4635, International Space Science Institute Project 510, and was supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (BR231802). This research was undertaken with the assistance of resources and services from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), which is supported by the Australian Government, under the merit allocation scheme jk72 and gv90. This project is supported in part by the joint project of INTERAAC, co-funded by the National Key R\&D Program of China (grant no.: 2022YFE0106700), the Research Council of Norway (grant no.: 328957), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 42030602). This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Special Research Initiative for Antarctic Gateway Partnership (SR140300001). We acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42576014), the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Fund for Excellent Young Scientists Fund Program (Overseas) (2023HWYQ-056), the Taishan Scholars Program (tsqnz20221111) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (202441007). This project was supported by the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative, Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (Project Number SR200100008). LGB is funded by the Australian Research Council. This research was also supported by use of the Nectar Research Cloud and by the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing. The Nectar Research Cloud is a collaborative Australian research platform supported by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy-funded Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The web-based tool Nilas was used for interpretation of results (doi:10.26179/qh66-7p96).
- Status
- On going
Point of contact
- Topic category
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- Oceans
Extent
N
S
E
W
))
Temporal extent
- Time period
- 2014-03-14
- Maintenance and update frequency
- Annually
- Global Change Master Directory Earth Science Keywords, Version 8.5
Resource constraints
- Use limitation
- Data, products and services from IMAS are provided "as is" without any warranty as to fitness for a particular purpose.
Resource constraints
- Other constraints
- Fraser, A. (2026). Antarctic marginal ice zone width data from AltiKa [Data set]. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies. https://doi.org/10.25959/J17B-CT76
Resource constraints
- Linkage
-
https://licensebuttons.net/l/by-nc/4.0/88x31.png
License Graphic
- Title
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
- Alternate title
- CC-BY-NC
- Edition
- 4.0
- Website
-
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
License Text
- Other constraints
- The citation in a list of references is: "Citation author name/s (year metadata published), metadata title. Citation author organisation/s. File identifier and Data accessed at (add http link)."
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Content Information
- Content type
- Physical measurement
Distribution Information
- Distribution format
-
- CSV
- OnLine resource
- DATA DOWNLOAD - Output 2013-2024 (12mb .zip)
Resource lineage
- Statement
- See Fraser et al., 2026 (Nature Communications) for a full method description. In short: All waveforms are acquired from AltiKa Level 2B data. These are processed to compute the slope of leading edge for each 40 Hz waveform. Where the product of slope of leading edge (SLE) and waveform peakiness (retrieved as processed from AltiKa L2B data) exceeds an experimentally-determined threshold, this is considered the inner limit of wave penetration. The wave-affected MIZ width is then computed as the meridional difference between the ice edge location and the inner limit of wave penetration.
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
Metadata
- Metadata identifier
- urn:uuid/0664fa8c-cf8b-4cfd-9bde-9923882fe54c
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Type of resource
- Resource scope
- Dataset
- Name
- IMAS Dataset level record
- Metadata linkage
-
https://metadata.imas.utas.edu.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/0664fa8c-cf8b-4cfd-9bde-9923882fe54c
Point of truth URL of this metadata record
- Date info (Creation)
- 2026-04-09T00:00:00
- Date info (Revision)
- 2026-04-10T15:22:58
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO 19115-3:2018
Overviews
Spatial extent
N
S
E
W
Provided by
Associated resources
Not available