We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Application of Wide‐Beam Transmission for Advanced Operations of SuperDARN Borealis Radars in Monostatic and Multistatic Modes.
- Authors
Rohel, R. A.; Ponomarenko, P.; McWilliams, K. A.
- Abstract
The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) consists of more than 30 monostatic high‐frequency (HF, 8–20 MHz) radars to study dynamic processes in the ionosphere. SuperDARN provides maps of global‐scale ionospheric plasma drift circulation from the mid‐latitudes to the poles. The conventional SuperDARN radars consecutively scan through 16 beam directions with a lower limit of 1 minute to sample the entire field of view. In this work, we use the advanced capabilities of the recently developed Borealis digital SuperDARN radar system. Combining a wide transmission beam with multiple narrow reception beams allows us to sample all conventional beam directions simultaneously and to speed up scanning of the entire field‐of‐view by up to 16 times without noticeable deterioration of the data quality. The wide‐beam emission also enabled the implementation of multistatic operations, where ionospheric scatter signals from one radar are received by other radars with overlapping viewing areas. These novel operations required the development of a new model to determine the geographic location of the source of the multistatic radar echoes. Our preliminary studies showed that, in comparison with the conventional monostatic operations, the multistatic operations provide a significant increase in geographic coverage, in some cases nearly doubling it. The multistatic data also provide additional velocity vector components, increasing the likelihood of reconstructing full plasma drift velocity vectors. The developed operational modes can be readily implemented at other fully digital SuperDARN radars. Plain Language Summary: The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) consists of more than 30 high‐frequency (HF, 8–20 MHz) radars that observe the ionized part of the Earth's atmosphere to study Space Weather phenomena, like magnetic storms and the aurora. Each SuperDARN radar transmits a radio wave at a particular frequency and receives the returns scattering from ionized structures. The returns are analyzed to extract information about processes in near‐Earth space. Conventionally, these radars scan 16 azimuthal directions consecutively, dwelling for 3.5 s in each direction, which restricts a scan of the field‐of‐view to 1 minute. In this work, we use a recently developed digital SuperDARN radar system called Borealis to shorten the scan duration by an order of magnitude by illuminating the whole field of view with a broad transmitter beam and receiving radar returns from all 16 directions simultaneously using narrow receiver beams. We also implemented a technique to receive signals sent from one radar by other radars with overlapping viewing areas. This provides a significant increase (nearly doubles) the geographic area of coverage, compared with using the same radar for both transmission and reception. Key Points: We developed wide‐beam transmission to probe an entire Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) field of view simultaneously and to enable bistatic operationsNew multistatic operation of SuperDARN radars provides additional measured velocity vector componentsNew wide‐beam and multistatic operations significantly improve temporal resolution and spatial coverage by SuperDARN
- Subjects
BISTATIC radar; SHORTWAVE radio; RADAR; RADIO waves; RADIO wave propagation; MAGNETIC storms; IONOSPHERIC plasma
- Publication
Radio Science, 2024, Vol 59, Issue 5, p1
- ISSN
0048-6604
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1029/2023RS007900