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Please cite this item as: 'Gerrish, L., Fretwell, P., & Cooper, P. (2020). Medium resolution vector contours for Antarctica (7.3) [Data set]. UK Polar Data Centre, Natural Environment Research Council, UK Research & Innovation. https://doi.org/10.5285/F46CF1F9-1A25-40D4-BFBC-5C6BB07CFC15'.

If using for a graphic or if short on space, please cite as 'data from the SCAR Antarctic Digital Database, accessed [year]'

Methodology:

All processing described here was performed in ArcGIS Pro version 2.6.

A composite Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was created comprising of three datasets from the Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica v1.1: REMA_100m_peninsula_dem_filled, REMA_100m_dem and REMA_200m_dem_filled. These DEMs were first converted from ellipsoidal height to height above EGM2008 geoid and then mosaicked together in respective order at 100 m spatial resolution. This 100 m DEM was smoothed by performing Focal Statistics using a 40x40 cell size.

500 m contours were extracted and all contours with a height <1m were deleted, as well as erroneous offshore contours. In certain locations, primarily some islands on the Antarctic Peninsula, REMA data was insufficient to produce contours. In these places, contours were produced from the 'Copernicus WorldDEM 90m' DEM and smoothed by 4 km using a PAEK smoothing algorithm. Contours for Peter I y were incorporated from the Norwegian Polar Institute Data at 100 m intervals: 500 m intervals were extracted and smoothed by 800 m, to match the appropriate resolution of the main contours.

All contours were merged together and lines <5 km in length were deleted. Further lines <20 km were deleted in non-mountainous regions, so as to avoid deleting small mountain peak contours but to still simplify the main dataset. These regions were interpreted manually using the hillshade of the DEM used to produce the contours.