Where have you been, Polarstern? – The most likely position for each moment in a long traveller’s life

We have investigated the quality of position data of one of the longest continuously documented history of an individual research vessel: The impressing track record of the German icebreaking research vessel Polarstern started the 9th of December 1982 and continues up to date. The ship has travelled 1 639 449 nautical miles (until the end of 2016) during the last 35 years and yields thus a huge amount of global position data gathered using different systems. The data quality and frequency was continuously updated and improved. Here, we present an approach to represent the whole track record at respective maximum achievable accuracy in a unified format. This data set, the so-called ›Master Track‹ represents the most likely position during all of Polarstern’s voyages.

Polarstern | track record | positioning | antenna position | motion data