Polar digital space in Antarctica

Abstract

Through the creation of a polar digital space and the data architecture in it, an attempt will be made to get as close as possible to the real possibilities of building a Digital Twin in the Antarctic or the polar region, and also to propose the European data policy in the Antarctic and the Arctic. The polar digital space www.destination-earth-antarctica.eu even local to Livingston Island will help to tackle complex environmental challenges by observe and simulate the development of the earth system (land, sea, atmosphere, biosphere) and human intervention; forecasting of environmental and extreme disasters and resulting crises, enable the development and testing of scenarios for increasingly sustainable development. These are great initiatives, but they need to accumulate data. Livingstone Island during the Antarctic summer has an extreme increase in human presence, but this is not necessarily a negative impact. Rather, it is necessary to track exchange and summarize data on any type of event in a timely manner. A differentiated monitoring approach has been used and hybrid monitoring models have already been created1. The data sources and instruments at many of the Antarctic bases are not interoperable, and this creates a major problem for comparison and simulation modeling even on a single island, let alone a larger area or the Antarctic mainland. In most of the polar summer, the optical data is not of good quality due to the presence of frequent cloud cover. This necessitates the mandatory use of in situ data in order to verify the others. The purpose of this type of research is to enforce certain standards for data dissemination such as Open Data, Open Science, and also to show the dynamics of certain territories on Livingstone Island based on research from the summer of 2022-2023 through various methods, indеxes Modified Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI2), Normalized Differential Glacier Index (NDGI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), NDSI (Normalized Difference Snow Index), NDSII (Normalized Difference Snow and Ice Index, Moisture Stress Index (MSI). and SAR indexes. The data used are from a drone, in situ data from a SEKONIC spectrometer, data from a ground local weather station, GPS coordinates and satellite data A ground weather station AWG, powered by an environmentally friendly magnesium-air battery, was developed especially for a project of the Bulgarian Antarctic Base. The data and models will serve the Bulgarian initiative for the construction of the Digital Twins in Antarctica and Arctica or Digital polar space, which is being pilot developed in the department of Aerospace Information, Space Research and Technology Institute – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.