Alex J. Tate

The new UK polar research vessel, RRS Sir David Attenborough, is currently undergoing tests and trials before deploying to the Antarctic in late 2021. The vessel hosts a wide array of scientific instrumentation and as a marine platform will deploy a range of remotely-operated data gathering equipment, both marine and airborne. The resulting datasets are both complex and voluminous and their management and availability need to fulfil the requirements of a wide range of end users from cruise participants to global data archiving facilities. The UK Polar Data Centre, based at the British Antarctic Survey, is leading on the development of the scientific data management systems aboard the new vessel. Major areas of focus include; data and event logging, data visualisation and access, automated quality control routines and sensor metadata. The presentation will provide an update on these major focus areas as well as an up-to-date overview of the scientific instrumentation currently being commissioned on the vessel and the types of data that are now being routinely collected.