Equivalent black carbon aerosol measured over the Southern Ocean in the austral summer of 2016/2017, during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition.

Dataset abstract The authors would highly appreciate to be contacted if the data is used for any purpose. We measured equivalent black carbon (eBC) with an aethalometer (model AE33, Magee Scientific) at a time resolution of one second during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE). We report five-minute averaged data, cleaned from exhaust gas influence. Temporal coverage is from December 20, 2016 to April 10, 2017. The mass concentration of eBC, reported in ng m-3, reflects how far fossil fuel combustion or biomass burning contribute to the aerosol population over the Southern Ocean and between South Africa and Europe. Over the Southern Ocean there are no sources of eBC, except for ship emissions and (sub-)Antarctic station emissions, and hence an enhancement of eBC points towards long-range influence from Africa, Australia, New Zealand and South America. When plotted against latitude, eBC concentrations drop south of 60°S, indicating a more pristine environment. Elevated concentration around the equator are likely influenced by biomass burning in tropical Africa. Dataset contents ACESPACE_equivalent_black_carbon_aerosol.csv, data file, comma-separated values data_file_header.txt, metadata, text README.md, metadata, text The data file listed above contains five-minute averaged values of equivalent black carbon (eBC) measured during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition. Timestamps are the end of the five-minute period over which the eBC values were averaged. Latitude and longitude are average values of the position of the measurement during the five-minute interval. NaN values of eBC denote missing values because of e.g., ship exhaust contamination, maintenance, instrument failure or signal noise levels exceeding 200 ng/m3. For latitude and longitude, NaN values are noted in cases where position data was not available for the given time period. Dataset license This equivalent black carbon dataset is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) whose full text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/The Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition was made possible by funding from the Swiss Polar Institute and Ferring Pharmaceuticals. We acknowledge the Swiss National Sciences Foundation grant no. 200021_169090 and the German Research Foundation (DFG) within SSP 1158 (Grant no. STR 453/12-1)