ON-SITE DATA-PROCESSING ALGORITHM AND OPTIMIZATION FOR AIRBORNE ICE SOUNDING RADAR CONFIGURED ON THE “SNOW EAGLE 601”

Abstract. Airborne observation is an important approach to collect data in the remote, hostile Antarctica and study the relationship between the Antarctica and global climate. During airborne observations, it is necessary to conduct data processing and quality control on site, which can help to timely evaluate the status of airborne instruments, provide scientific clues, and develop ideal schemes for following airborne observations. As one critical component of airborne instruments, airborne ice sounding radar can delineate sub-ice bedrock topography and internal layers, which cannot be realized by other instruments. In this study, we present an on-site data processing algorithm for high-resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ice sounding radar data acquired by the “Snow Eagle 601”, the first fixed-wing airplane deployed by China for the Antarctic expeditions. In addition, the algorithm is further optimized in terms of static pre-allocated memory and parallel and block processing of data to enhance processing speed and meet the requirements for quality control and analysis of on-site data. Finally, we test the optimized algorithm with different volume of ice sounding radar data through implementing on different computer configurations, including i7, i5 CPU and 8G, 16G memory with the same disk. The results show that the average processing speed of the optimized algorithm is 5.143 times faster than the non-optimized algorithm on different computer configurations.