Sondrestrom Research Facility Operations and Maintenance

Intellectual Merit: SRI is at the forefront of auroral research and operates several radar facilities designed to study ionospheric processes primarily in the auroral zone. SRI was responsible for managing, staffing, operating, maintaining, and upgrading the NSF Sondrestrom facility and for providing the scientific analysis, assistance, vision, and leadership that made the site a world-class upper-atmospheric research facility. Sondrestrom’s polar location, infrastructure, maintenance team, variety of instruments, innovation in instrument development, and its community service, user support, and educational programs have enabled its contributions to many scientific advances.

Sondrestrom is especially well suited to study the response and variability of the high-latitude ionosphere and the ionosphere’s role in the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere system. The high-latitude thermosphere and ionosphere host a broad range of energy-transfer processes, and the magnetosphere is the most dynamic. The height-resolved E-region measurements provided by the incoherent scatter radar (ISR) enable the most accurate and comprehensive technique available for observing E-region electrodynamics and provide important insight into auroral energetics, current flow, and energy deposition at high latitudes. These three ionospheric properties represent major challenges at polar latitudes because of the complex coupling that occurs between the polar ionosphere and magnetosphere. Sondrestrom’s simultaneous multispectral images of the aurora have opened a new area of study concerned with the broad energy distributions expected with auroral activity. This new study area relates directly to understanding magnetospheric sources of energetic particle precipitation.

Broader Impacts: The Sondrestrom site crew hosted dozens of tours each year, mostly for Danish students at both elementary and high school levels. An average of almost 400 visitors toured the facilities annually, including reporters from print media in the U.S., Denmark, and Greenland. Each summer, the site hosted a specialized tour during NSF’s “Science and Technology Education Week” for educators, students, and journalists from Greenland, Denmark, and the U.S. The site also hosted summertime students and educators from the NSF Joint Science Education Program (JSEP). JSEP brought the members of the Greenland Education Tour to the site where they participated in bringing the ISR on-line, monitoring data collection, and attending a multi-hour lecture about ionospheric processes and aurora while watching the data in real-time. The activities of these six teachers and twenty-four students from the U.S., Denmark, and Greenland during their multi-week expedition in Greenland are chronicled for the public at their website.

Resultant Publications

Highlights from the publications that used Sondrestrom Research Facility in the past year include the following:

Dhadly et al. [2017a and 2017b] published two climatological studies on seasonal dependence of northern high-latitude thermospheric winds during quiet and active times using winds data from the Sondrestrom Fabry-Perot Interferometer as one of the data sources.

Akbari et al. [2017] published a review paper on incoherent scatter plasma lines discussing both the underlying plasma physics and the applications using plasma lines. The paper notes that the Sondrestrom radar, with its L-band frequency, is unique in capturing auroral plasma lines with extremely high time cadence (200ms), which opens up new possibilities for studying sub-second dynamics during auroral precipitation.

Friis-Christensen et al. [2017] studied magnetic field perturbations from currents in the dark polar region during quiet geomagnetic conditions using the DMI magnetometer located at the site as part of the larger chain of magnetometers across Greenland.

Burleigh and Zettergren [2017] developed anisotropic fluid modeling for ionospheric upflow. The simulation of the model was centered at the Sondrestrom location as it is an interesting location to study ion upflow. This model developed in the paper was used to examine differences between isotropic and anisotropic descriptions of ionospheric upflow driven by DC electric fields, possible effects of low-altitude (<500 km) wave heating, and impacts of neutral winds on ion upflow.

Research Products and Availability

The most widely used research product was the Sondrestrom website, which provides general information; point of contact information for each instrument; directions for requesting data; logistical support and experiment timing information; lists of ISR, lidar, color all-sky imager (CASI), and all-sky imager (ASI) observations; access to quick-look plots; and information about current research topics. All the Sondrestrom ISR data have been processed and loaded into the Madrigal distributed database, which is administered by the Haystack Observatory at Millstone Hill. All the data in the distributed Madrigal database have also been ingested into the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) database.

Last Modified: 07/25/2018
Modified by: Elizabeth A Kendall