Seismo-Acoustic Sensing on the Beaufort Sea in the 2021 Sea Ice Dynamics Experiment (SIDEx)

The 2021 collaborative Sea Ice Dynamics Experiment (SIDEx'21) was conducted in March and April on an ice floe in the Beaufort Sea and included comprehensive instrumentation and measurement of the ice during the spring breakup. Part of this sensing suite was an extensive network of seismo-acoustic sensors deployed at a multiyear/first-year ice boundary with hydrophones under and geophones on top of the ice of thicknesses ranging from one meter to five meter thickness. At the center of the sensing array was a cabled system with 18 hydrophones in five subarrays and four three-axis geophones spanning a diamond with minor axis of 60 m and a major axis of 90 m. Eleven stand-alone three-axis geophone nodes formed a larger array of approximately 1 km by 500 m; eight of these nodes were successful in data collection. The cabled system recorded near-continuous data from March 5 to April 7 before running out of disk space; nodes in the stand-alone system continued to record data through recovery on April 26. This article describes the array geometry, deployment, data set, and array calibration. This article also provides information on accessing and using the cabled array data set, which the authors are making available to the community to encourage interdisciplinary analysis.