FACE off

(UPDATED)

The run last night was pretty useless. Although conditions were optically good no activity occurred at all and the ionosphere essentially disappeared. The one quiet arc that we saw did not come to anything and although a substorm did occur, it was not until our run had finished and the optical conditions had deteriorated.



It is an ASK run tonight and we have bad skies with some rain and snow today. The ionosphere was originally perky but then faded. It does seem to be coming back a bit now, perhaps due to some IMF-Mag coupling since Bz has been southward a few times this evening for 10-40 minutes. The slow solar wind speed (~350 km/s) means quite a delay before the effects may be felt here.



We have canceled tomorrow night; I was originally intending to run since the solar wind stream should be rotating into view. However it is Southampton's last opportunity for ASK and so we have given them the chance. I am unsure what the weather will be like though. We are going to run on both Sunday and Monday and hopefully the weather will be good...

UPDATE (20:00 UT): Conditions have improved, the sky is clearing, auroral arcs can be seen and there is a quite strong E-layer. We have just switched over to arc1.

First FACE

It is beautifully clear tonight, though the ionosphere is currently weak with little sign of geomagnetic activity. Not sure that the solar wind holds much promise either but it is still early.

We are currently running DROP-HOAX and Andrew is running ASK for Southampton (though I am keeping an eye on it at the moment whilst he finalises scan patterns for FACE tonight). AT 19 UT we will swap over to FACE and see if we can measure some field aligned currents in a nice arc, then after any substorm activity we will switch over to BATTY and hope for black aurora...

After the run last night we saw some great aurora; it virtually filled the sky and was set off by some wonderful shooting stars. Maybe even saw some omega bands, though I am not sure - camera data will tell us later.

ASK run update

(updated)

Things have improved. A period of sustained negative IMF has led to a nicely active substorm. A quiet arc was visible overhead as the clouds departed. Things have been ticking over nicely since then.

The ESR is now working after a strange problem with the ion line data recorder. Not sure why it was unable to write to the recorder or why it started working again but operations began at 21:22:39 UT. Only 2 hours 22 minutes lost, not so bad really as the conditions were not great then anyway. I hope that means that I won't be charged for those hours.

No sign of my dinner and so I can only assume that Mike's aim of focusing the old DASI camera has taken much longer than the estimated 30 minutes. :-(

Update: Aha, dinner is in the process of being cooked. Hurrah!

Cancellation + ASK

Yesterday's run (LANCS) was cancelled based on both weather and potential geomagnetic activity. Sadly it turned out that the weather was not so bad and that there was an unexpected upswing in the activity with a couple of substorms going off. Since the cameras were not ready anyway it didn't really matter. Too bad but c'est la vie.

Andrew ran HIPI for the first time yesterday with some promising results.

Tonight ASK is running and from 17 UT X mode heating is also occurring in an effort to detect the sodium emission using super-Sparkle. Unfortunately the ionosphere is currently incredibly weak, geomagnetic activity is low and last time I was outside it was snowing. Steve Crothers should be starting MISS up at the ESR shortly. As things stand it is generally pointless but unfortunately optimism stopped me from canceling. It will be an opportunity to determine whether the 'new' Steffe experiment is suitable (or at least workable) for the southward low-elevation pointing direction. I suspect it will turn out not to be and we will see if a suitable replacement can be shoved in.

10th November 2006 -EISCAT campaign!

Hello all,  another campaign begins next week but Andrew and I are already here trying to set things up in time for our first runs.

Lots to do, notably we need to set up several pieces of optical kit:
DASI
DASI2
SuperSparkle

So far we only have SuperSparkle with us, the rest should have arrived yesterday delivered by DHL.  Except it wasn't and now we are still waiting for it to arrive today.  After much phonecalling it will allegedly be here between 5.30 and 6pm.

More later...

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Day Sixteen - Wet!

An early start today as Andrew and I headed to the ARIES site to effect repairs. We think that we have successfully straightened all of the antennae that were leaning most. We also replaced all but one of the broken guy wires (we ran out of rope) and fixed two of the frayed ropes.

That took most of the morning and some of the afternoon. It rained through most of it, though there were some dry patches. When I got up this morning I was surprised to not see the hill behind the VHF it was completely obscured by fog/cloud from top to bottom.

Tonight the weather at Tromso is poor but at Keops it is clear and so we are running the UCL DAEA experiment. Unfortunately whilst it might be optically clear there is little or no ionosphere over Kiruna according to the radar and so the data looks very poor. Indeed we have nothing but noise from both remote sites.

It is dismantle time for the optics here at Tromso. Todd has taken his camera down and has calibtrated it thanks to sources supplied by Bjorn Gustafson. I left him packing it away a couple of hours ago. Similarly I clambered into the dome space and very carefully removed DASI and Sparkle. DASI has now been packed into its case and Sparkle awaited calibration, which Andrew is now performing whilst I babysit the radar. We need to disconnect our dome blowers and reinstate the Canadian dome blower before we leave.

Looking forward to getting home. Overall the campaign has been a mixed bag; the optics side has been a let down with only one night of potentially good data for Lancaster. I don't know how UCL have done with their FPI measurements. The Finns also had a wash out. We do have some good radar data from other experiments and so it has been successful on that scale.

Though of course every silver lining has a dirty, big, rain-filled cloud behind it. One of my interests in the PAMS study is identifying precipitation drift echoes. I think we have found some in the data from the 8/10/2005, and I suspect we have some on the 10/10/2005. Unfortunately there is a big data gap in the LANL data just at that time so I have no way of verifying. Hopefully this is a temporary effect.

Next campaign we will hopefully have the freshly repaired ARIES running and we will be able to get some very nice high spatial resolution data for both PAMS and DLETE. But that can wait until 2006...

Day Fifteen - One full day to go

Today has been quite quiet. Unlike the night in which the wind blew hard; and I mean hard. The hilton was shaking and I did wonder whether when I got up, I would have same view out of the window that I had when I went to bed!

It has drizzled with rain all day but we do have some very good news: the sky is clear at Keops and so tonight we will run the DAEA experiment for UCL. Andrew managed to barter with Mike Rietveld and Brett Isham for some time since they had first priority.

Apart from that there is little to report. We went to the local shop again and were served by the jolly man this time. He said some things to us in Norwegian even though we are sure he knows that we are ignorant English. He seemed very happy as per usual. Of course, he could be tossing terribly obscene insults at us and we would never know...

Early start tomorrow. It is still forecast to be piddling down with rain but we have one last chance to get to ARIES and make some repairs. We shall see what we can manage. After that I have to ensure that I get a copy of the Heater log so as to ensure that my expectations of what was on and what was off match up with reality. We have no facility for transferring data with us and so we rely in RAL to do that for us. I think next time we should bring a hard drive to grab data and potential analysis that we do on site. No time for analysis tomorrow with our field trip, but we are well set up to make a start when we get back to the UK (after some time off maybe?). We will also run the radar tomorrow night, once again for DAEA I think. Then there is also the matter of dismantling the photometer and cameras and putting the hut back as it was. This can be done in stages since once we know that DROP is over with, we can take down Sparkle and pack it up for transport.

Todd had some good news about his camera. He can potentially fix the instrument in Oslo and then ship it back up to Svalbard ready for the season. This is very good because so far the guy has endured rain, broken equipment and 6 hours of hand cranking an instrument to enable good data recordings.

Tomorrow is my 3rd wedding anniversary. The second where I have been away from Emma in service to Comms. Systems at Lancaster University. How is that for devotion??? Now, when is a good time to start talking about a pay rise?

Day Fourteen - Data afterglow and evening

Yesterday (Monday, Day 14) was a very succesful run for my two experiments: PAMS (Pulsed Absorption in the Morning Sector) and DLETE (D - Layer Electron Temperature Enhancements).

During the earlier PAMS run we had some very nice precipitation effects that were distinctly quai-periodic, including potential drift echoes, which is another of my interests. The DLETE run is always harder to measure since we are interested not in the electron density, but rather in measuring any perceptable effects on the electron temperature. Te is notoriously difficult to measure in the D-Layer with incoherent scatter techniques. In fact, for difficult, read impossible. The closest thing we can get is to measure the spectral width of the returned signal; this is partly controlled by the electron temperature. By using the heater to pump in an on/off cycle we can compare the change in width on a statistical basis. That is the plan, anyway. However today we had a more immediate indicator that our heating was having an effect. As I reported, some PMWE appeared. It did disappear after a while but then cam back and it looks as if we might have succeeded in modulating it. For the last half hour or so we switched to a 1 minute on/off cycle and saw distinct changes in the returned power at the same frequency. There were other factors that made this very exciting as well. You can see the results on our EISCAT results page along with results from the FACE experiment runs.

Although cloudy last night Andrew ran the FACE experiment, this time using the arc1 modulation. However the data from the remotes was incredibly poor, even for similar levels of electron density. Andrew is working on his Plasma Line experiment but due to some possible changes in the operating system (we don't know what) it would not work. Brett Isham is having similar problems. The UHF started acting up towards the end of the run and so with a few minutes to go until teh scheduled stop time Andrew called a halt when yet another crow bar took the system down.

One thing that I have learned on this campaign is that in terms of steady reliabilty, the VHF surpasses the UHF. However the VHF is severely limited in pointing direction and when it has had faults they always seem to be big, hard to repair ones. It may go offline less frequently, but if we relied on just it we would probably be offline for long periods.

Day Fourteen - The Saga Continues...

I shall be switching over to DLETE in about 6 minutes. Mike will begin tuneup at 8 UT and then we will modulate at 08:10 UT. The pattern I chose basically swaps short bursts for longer on periods in 20/30/40 minute cycles. This provides several oppurtunities to decipher the heating effect in the D-layer by integrating over cycles without having too much variability in the ionosphere from the start to the end of the cycle. Well that is my intention.

So far the PAMS run has been a pretty good success. The increased electron density at ~6:15 UT has hung around and in fact has shown signs of long period quasi-periodicity. Thus I have managed to capture an example of both standard ULF and quasi-periodic precipitation in this campaign.

In addition since ~7:20 UT there has been a varying but generally consistent signature at about 68 km altitude in the electron density. This has all the hallmarks of being PMWE. It may hang around as we begin to heat which would be interesting. I wonder how much Mike Kosch might pay me for access to this data :-)

Although the data is good for PAMS I am happy to switch to DLETE. The increased D layer provides an excellent target plus the results of modelling by SGO indicates that the effect on absorption is very small (hence much integration). So as long as we analyse carefully we should be confident that any effects to EISCAT are solely in the spectral width and not in the electron density and are unlikely to appear in a time series beyond the noise. Thus this DLETE data will be good for PAMS studies also.

I think.


The PMWE might have disappeared, though it is hard to say as we got some very intense precipitation down to 65 km around 8 UT. DLETE modulation actually began at 08:15 UT after a slight cock-up between local and universal time.

Day Fourteen (UPDATED)

Another early start today, but probably my last. I am inclined towards cancelling my last PAMS run tomorrow, I'd rather keep 12 hours in reserve. Plus I don't want to use all of the UK time on my experiments when there is still the tiny possibility of running the optics.

Things started quietly this morning. No D-layer to speak of, though I think that a few hours earlier had been better. Most activity seems to be occuring further poleward, including some ULF signatures. It improved here at about 6:15 UT when some strong precipitation occurred. Unfortunately this coincided with a large crowbar (the fourth of the morning) that took the radar offline for almost 5 minutes - a great shame. Anyway, things continue to look good for the moment.

It is my intention to swap to DLETE at 8 UT today, unless Mike has other ideas. A breakdown of my time so far (and projected) is shown. Since I am working on a 1.8 multiplication for DLETE I hope that EISCAT does not round up my usage, that is a vital half hour :-)


I spent a good portion of yesterday asleep so no proper data analysis has been done yet. The first day still looks the best though. Andrew and I did go to the ARIES site yesterday evening in an attempt to fix some more guy wires. However, we noted that those that we did manage to do last week had no tension. When an attempt was made to remove the slack via the rusty looking thingames (yes, that is a technical term) at the bottom of the wire, it would not budge - even with a squirt of faux-WD40. Andrew taped up his (rapidly disintegrating) knots to try and hold it in place and then we left. We would have stayed longer except that a driving wind had come up, it was getting dark and we were drenched in the rain! Perhaps we will try again today, but we feel that we are making zero progress. The good news is that the actual antenna poles and the dipoles look to be in very good order.

UPDATE: I notice that all data from SEC at NOAA seems to be stuck on two days ago. This means no current geostationary data and I am relying on SOHO for my solar wind data. Mike Rietveld has fixed the Dynasonde, however.

UPDATE2: D'oh! I mixed my hours up. Today should only have been 3.5 for PAMS since we started DLETEing at 8 UT. This has been corrected.

UPDATE3: More D'oh! Due to exciting results, and in pursuit of science, the DLETE run for today was extended to ~13:30 UT. This means that my little chart is completely wrong and so I shall post another in the next day or so.