University visit

Last week a couple of us from SGO visited the main university campus in Oulu. As most of our readers will know, KAIRA is operated by Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, which in turn is part of the University of Oulu. it is quite a long way from Kilpisjärvi to Oulu, but that's where we were last week and have a photograph of the towers of learning to share.

University of Oulu (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

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

IRIS - Imaging Riometer for Ionospheric Studies

IRIS is an imaging riometer, located at Kilpisjärvi, not too far from KAIRA. It is a single-frequency riometer and images the ionospheric absorption using fixed multibeams (unlike KAIRA which uses both fixed and tracking beams, as well as interferometry). The IRIS beams are formed using Butler matrices.IRIS is operated by the University of Lancaster, UK, with assistance from SGO. It is quite an old instrument and has been operating since September 1994. Its receiver frequency is 38.2 MHz. KAIRA often runs experiments at similar frequencies (for us, subband 195) in order to carry out comparative experiments.

IRIS (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Applied Inverse Problems 2015

A major inverse problems conference, Applied Inverse Problems, will be organised in Helsinki, Finland, May 25-29, 2015. The event website is at http://aip2015.fips.fi. Important dates are:

• Mini-symposium Proposal Deadline: September 30, 2014

• Poster, Contributed Talk, and Minisymposium Talk Abstract Deadline: November 30, 2014

• Calderon Prize Nomination Deadline: January 31, 2015

• Early Bird Registration Deadline: February 11, 2015

LBA repairs

Well, as reported, the jänis had struck twice and that meant lots of repair work for us. Actually in total there were 14 x LBA aerials to fix.

Status on 27-Aig-2014

The storm damaged ones were the most work. There required fitting new connectors (the old ones had been ripped clean off during the impacts). The jänis-attacked LBAs were more numerous, but less time consuming.

Repaired LBA line (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

The fix was adding a new length of nylon guy line. A double-fisherman's bend is used to join the new section of line to the old and a bowline is used to make the loop to hook over the peg.

To discourage the jänis from simply biting through these again, we smeared the lines with a combination of spray lubricant and grease. This is waterproof and should give a bad smell and texture, thus deterring further jänis attacks.

However, in the long-term, we'll still need to work out a better way of protecting the LBA aerial lines.

Jänis attacks!

Last week we made a service visit to KAIRA. There were four LBA aerials still down from the blizzard of 2014 and these needed fixing. However, on arrival at the site, we noted that there were some other LBA aerials down.

What?!

We hadn't noticed this in the data, so it must have been recent. And inspection of the field indicated that the nylon lines had been cut on multiple LBA aerials, which is what had caused them to fall.

A cut LBA line. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Field of woe. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

We believe that the cause of this is a jänis (Wikipedia). These creatures like to gnaw on things and it looks like the LBA array was the target. Knowing our luck, it was probably the cute jänis we saw a while back.


What's worse, on the second day, we found yet more LBA aerials down. The jänis had struck again! (This led to much silliness on twitter.)

In total, some 10 LBAs were downed over two days (26-27 Aug 2014). More repair work for us then.

KAIRA spectral riometry paper out!

I'm happy to announce that our proof-of-concept study on the electron density profile estimation based on the KAIRA spectral riometry measurement has been finally published in the Geophysical Research Letters, please have a look:

Kero, A., J. Vierinen, D. McKay-Bukowski, C.-F. Enell, M. Sinor, L. Roininen, and Y. Ogawa (2014), Ionospheric electron density profiles inverted from a spectral riometer measurement, Geophys. Res. Lett., 41,  doi:10.1002/2014GL060986

By comparing our spectral riometry results to a simultaneous EISCAT VHF measurement, we were able to show that the methodology works, at least under conditions of relatively strong ionisation. This builds confidence towards continuous monitoring of height-dependent D-region ionisation by spectral riometry.