Precipitation at Dumont d'Urville, Adélie Land, East Antarctica: theAPRES3 dataset

Abstract. Compared to the other continents and lands, Antarctica suffers a severe shortage of in-situ observations of precipitation. APRES3 (Antarctic Precipitation, Remote Sensing from Surface and Space) is a program dedicated to improve the observation of the Antarctic precipitation, both from the surface and from space, to assess climatologies and evaluate and ameliorate meteorological and climate models. A field measurement campaign was deployed at Dumont d'Urville station at the coast of Adelie Land in Antarctica, with an intensive observation period from November 2015 to February 2016 followed by continuous radar monitoring through 2016 and beyond. Among other results, the observations show that a significant fraction of precipitation sublimates in a dry surface katabatic layer before it reaches and accumulates at the surface, a result evidenced thanks to the profiling capabilities of precipitation radars. While the bulk of the data analyses and scientific results are published in specialized journals, this paper provides a compact description of the dataset now archived on PANGAEA data repository ( https://www.pangaea.de , doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.883562 ) and made open to the scientific community to further its exploitation for antarctic meteorology and climate research purposes.