The Data Champion Award 2025 was awarded to Dr. Steven Franke, Dr. Veit Helm, and Dr. Daniel Steinhage from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, in recognition of their collaborative development of the 'Radar Data Viewer'.
Cooperative approach with significant added value
Their collaborative approach, the significant added value for the polar and climate research community, and the strong integration with the established data platform PANGAEA exemplify the spirit of the Data Champion Award in an outstanding way. What stood out in particular was the team's remarkable personal commitment and strong team culture in carrying out the project. Thanks to continuous development, the project also holds the potential for long-term impact. Additionally, the research context - all about polar and climate research - carries considerable societal relevance.
Radar Data Viewer
(1) The inventory of the radar data archive and the location of radar profiles in Antarctica and the Arctic can be viewed via the Helmholtz Marine Data Portal: (Radar Data Overview | Marine Data Portal.
(2) The radar data themselves are archived and accessible on the PANGAEA Data Portal: (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.972094) .
Radar Data Viewer
The Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) has conducted over three decades airborne radio-echo sounding (RES or simply radar) campaigns across Antarctica and Greenland, utilizing six generations of radar systems to study ice sheets and their interactions with climate and geological processes.
These surveys have generated comprehensive datasets of more than 500.000 km in length, critical for understanding ice sheet thickness, internal stratigraphy, basal conditions, and subglacial topography and englacial physical properties. The data provide insights into ice dynamics, mass balance, and the evolution of ancient landscapes buried beneath the ice. The integration of radar data with other geophysical methods has enhanced bathymetric models, improved predictions of ice-ocean interactions and ice shelf stability.
To support scientific advancement, AWI has made these data publicly accessible in the so-called Radar Data Viewer through the Hemholtz Marine Data Portal in combination with PANGAEA, ensuring compliance with FAIR principles. These datasets, presented in standardized and open access formats, include supplementary metadata and quicklook radargrams for user convenience. The compilation of metadata, radar system characteristics as well as an executive summary of the Radar Data Viewer are currently being prepared for a data publication led by Dr. Steven Franke, now a postdoc and the University of Tübingen but also still affiliated with AWI.
The process of collecting all the data and metadata, unifying it’s representation by reprocessing and correcting for missing metadata or incorrectly processed data, has been and still is an ongoing meticulous process conducted over the last three years, starting at the end of the pandemic in collaboration with several teams at AWI and PANGAEA.
AWI’s radar metadata are visualized in the Helmholtz Marine Data Portal, allowing users to browse and access the data. A dynamic online map is available, enabling the exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic regions in their respective polar stereographic projections and displaying the radar profiles. Filters are available for radar system type and data collection periods. Selecting a profile segment provides information about the radar type, campaign, PI’s, project name, and a DOI for downloading the dataset from PANGAEA. Additionally, a quicklook image of the radargram is displayed for the respective part of the profile.
Details on usage and features of the marine Data Portal are provided in the accompanying draft of the data publication and a demonstration video clip. In future the viewer and data base will be continuously updated with new campaign data to ensure FAIR principles and to provide our data as consistent, self describing, machine-independent easily accessible data format (netCDF) via PANGEA.
Impressions of the award ceremony
What is the Data Champion Award?
The Data Champion Award is an annual prize presented by DataNord. It recognizes outstanding achievements in the field of research data and exceptional commitment to FAIR data practices. The award includes a monetary prize of €1,500, which can be used for purchases or expenses related to data-intensive science, data science, or research data management (RDM). This award is intended not only to honor individual accomplishments but also to serve as an incentive to continue working at the highest level and to drive innovation forward.
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Further information / data protection
For the year 2024, Dr. Norbert Riefler from Leibniz-IWT has been selected as Data Champion. He is being honored for his leadership of the Data Steward Network of the U Bremen Research Alliance, his outstanding commitment, and his involvement in activities related to research data management and Open Science.
