Event Details

Seminar: New Results from the Borealis Digital Radar System for SuperDARN by Prof. Kathryn McWilliams of University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Abstract

The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is designed to monitor space-weather-driven plasma circulation in the Earth's ionosphere on a global scale. Conventional SuperDARN radars scan through narrow beam directions, transmitting and receiving from the same radar site. SuperDARN's high-frequency (HF, 10-18~MHz) transmitted signals are scattered from ionospheric irregularities or the ground surface. The received signals are processed to estimate signal-to-noise ratio, Doppler velocity and spectral width, all of which are used to investigate the ionosphere. The conventional SuperDARN radars consecutively scan through sixteen beam directions, which places a lower limit of one minute on a full scan of the field of view. The Canadian SuperDARN radars have been upgraded with a new SuperDARN digital radar system called Borealis, which we designed at the University of Saskatchewan. In the presentation, I will show you some early data from Borealis and some new applications. Borealis has allowed us to illuminate the entire conventional SuperDARN field of view simultaneously, rather than scanning sequentially through the beam directions, meaning we can make a full scan every 3.5 seconds. The full-FOV operations enables us to do multistatic operations, where ionospheric scatter of signals from one radar are received by other radars with overlapping viewing areas. The wideband receiver of Borealis means that, in principle, we can run monostatic and bistatic programs, which use different frequencies, at the same time.

Contact: n.rogers1@lancaster.ac.uk for Teams link