The SOAR Mission
The six-year Cooperative Agreement defined UTIG's responsibilities as:

-Assisting in the development of aerogeophysical research projects with NSF/OPP investigators

-Upgrading the CASERTZ instrumentation package to accommodate new science projects and advances in technology;  fielding this instrument package to accomplish SOAR developed projects

-Distribution of the acquired aerogeophysical data as spatially organized transects to the Project Investigators within six months of its return from the field.

An option was included for SOAR to reduce and analyze the aerogeophysical data that it collected for members of the scientific community without that capacity.

SOAR Accomplishments
Beginning in 1994, UTIG conducted aerogeophysical surveys in seven consecutive Antarctic field seasons. These SOAR-developed surveys were performed for the 20 investigators and 14 institutions listed in Table 1. The first six of these seasons were managed under the NSF/UTIG Cooperative Agreement with D. Blankenship as PI; the last, 2000/2001, was managed as a multi-investigator grant to UTIG with D. Blankenship, J. Holt, D. Morse and I. Dalziel as co PI's. To accomplish these surveys, UTIG configured the integrated instrumentation package and installed it in the aircraft on site in Antarctica each season; additionally, base camp operations were established at up to five remote sites each field season. In total, UTIG conducted an additional 225,000 line kilometers of aerogeophysical surveys in 422 flights covering the areas shown in the Figure. The spatially organized database of geophysical transects was delivered to the various investigators within the targeted six-month time frame.

For the last four field seasons, UTIG was also responsible for the reduction of the aerogeophysical data that it collected in Antarctica for SOAR developed projects. The final results delivered to investigators included profiles and maps of the ice-sheet surface and subglacial bedrock elevation (from ice-sheet thickness); in addition, maps of the distribution of free-air gravity and magnetic anomalies were produced (through the 1999/2000 field season) under subcontract to the LDEO and USGS, respectively. Each field season, UTIG collected about 250 Gbytes of geophysical and positioning data from the aircraft and base-station systems. Approximately 95% of this data volume was generated by the radar sounder with GPS positioning, avionics (primarily inertial navigation parameters and aircraft attitude), magnetometer, laser altimeter and gravimeter data streams contributing successively less data to the total. The large volume of data generated by these surveys necessitated the development of a uniform (and economical) reduction path with special accommodations for the labor-intensive interpretation of the radar sounding data. Based on our most recent experience, when data analysis was centralized at UTIG, a season's worth of such data could be reduced for the essential surface and bed elevation (or ice thickness) as well as the distribution of gravity and magnetic anomalies within about seven months of its return from the field.

Download SOAR data