Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory blog

There is a new web log. At the end of August, Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory general web log was started. It is being led by established KAIRA author Lassi Roininen and will feature others from the observatory, much more generally than what we have done here. The new site continues along the same path as our KAIRA web log, but the idea is to cover more widely the Observatory activities, including published papers, conference and workshop announcements, reporting on campaigns and extensive research visits, installation of new instruments etc.. Posts will be mostly in English, but with occasional content in Finnish and other languages too. We will also use this new web log for reporting sudden onset events. Naturally, there will also have been some more casual matters from time to time, including anecdotes about life at Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, the University of Oulu and various other things that form the Lapland experience in Arctic Finland.

So, for all regular readers here, do go an check the new SGO we blog at: blog.sgo.fi

100 years of measuring the geomagnetic field

Today, 1st January 2014, Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO) celebrates 100 years of  official geomagnetic measurements.

Yesterday at the observatory, we went down to the archives to take a look at those very first measurements. Well, here they are:

The original measurement records from SGO.
29-Dec-1913 - 01-Jan-1914 (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Current director, Esa Turunen, inspecting the original measurement
records from the archive. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

The oldest routine task of SGO is the regular measurement of the Earth's magnetic field. These measurements began on 1st January 1914 and continue until today. The only gap in the time series is between 16th September 1944 and 1st January 1947 due to the destruction of the observatory during the Lapland War.

The magnetic measurement huts (Image: SGO)

The analogue La Cour instrument was in operation until 31st December 1995. Nowadays digital data is produced in the variation room of the observatory by a Polish torsion photoelectric magnetometer (TPM), a Russian TPM magnetometer and a Danish fluxgate magnetometer (FGE). Weekly measurements of the absolute magnetic field provide the base line control.


LINK

Sodankylän geofysiikan observatorio 100v.

Harking back to our celebrations of the 100-years of Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, science journalist Jari Mäkinen presents a short video on Tiedetuubi. The text is in Finnish, but there is a lot to see of the host Observatory at Sodankylä. To quote from the Tiedetuubi website...

Sodankylän geofysiikan observatorio vietti syyskuun lopussa 100-vuotisjuhliaan ja Tiedetuubi kävi paikalla paitsi juhlimassa, niin myös tutkimassa mitä Sodankylässä oikein tehdään ja mitä sadan vuoden aikana on tapahtunut.

Visit their website here:   http://tiedetuubi.fi/?q=node/572

Sodankylä from the air

As you might have seen on the EISCAT_3D web log recently, there has been a great little video posted on YouTube by Tarmo Laakso, which shows a flight along the Kitinen River in the Sodankylä area.

You can watch for Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory. The Tähtelä site starts to appear at 2:49, with the EISCAT 32m dish coming into view at 2:54 and the Polaria main building at 2:56.

Test LBA system at Pittiövaara

The original plan was to build 96 LBA aerials at KAIRA. That plan was altered because of ground stability considerations, limited signal processing and some other interesting ideas. So, although we've installed 48 aerials at KAIRA, the remainder will be used for other tests and experiments.

At the moment, we've installed four of these aerials at Pittiövaara, a small field station not far from the main institute at Sodankylä. These are being used to test a new digital signal processing concept being developed by SGO.

One of the test aerials at the Pittiövaara site. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Of course, at KAIRA, being much further into the Arctic you would never get trees like this!