At Neumayer-Station in Antarctica snow height is permanently monitored with a laser distance meter. The instrument measures continuously since 2013-01-01 and is located in the vicinity of the Air Chemical Observatory Neumayer. By design, the sample area of the surface is on the order of a few millimetre in diameter. Long-term trends of the measured snow height are strongly correlated with accumulation on the ice shelf at a horizontal scale of several kilometres. Short-term trends reflect dynamic changes of the surface and can be used to deduce information on surface roughness.
The instrument suffered from issues with the supply voltage which led to temporal malfunction between 2023-10-08 and 2023-11-11.