Summary
Ship-based observations of sea ice conditions have been collated from 89 voyages to the Antarctic pack ice, between 1980 and 2005. These data were collected primarily by Russian, Australia, US, German and British vessels engaged in scientific and logistic activities as part of their national Antarctic programs. The data from each voyage has been quality controlled, digitised and converted to a standard format as defined by the Antarctic Sea Ice Processes and Climate (ASPeCt) program, which was established in 1997. The data have been analysed to assess the regional and seasonal variability in the ice thickness distribution and snow cover around Antarctica. While there are still a number of significant gaps in some regions and seasons, we have sufficient data to broadly characterise the character of the pack and to identify important regional and seasonal differences. We use a curve fitting routine to provide a numerical description of the ice thickness distribution and also provide a suite of standard statistics including the mean ice and snow thickness, standard deviation and decorrelation length scales. A brief summary of recent applications of the ASPeCt data archive will also be presented, including comparisons with model output and the development of a climatology of sea ice albedo. The ASPeCt data files will be available online via the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TP AC) Digital Data Library that will facilitate spatial and temporal queries on the data archive. Visit: http://digitallibrary.tpac.org.au.