EISCAT Radar School

EISCAT Radar School

First Week

The workshop will be preceded by an EISCAT Radar School. The first week of the school is devoted to new and future users of EISCAT or other incoherent scatter (IS) radars. It will introduce the basics of IS radar measurements in general and give motivating examples on how to use the radar. This includes joint operations of the radars together with the EISCAT Heating Facility. Furthermore, the school will show how to access and interpret EISCAT radar data.

For the first week, we will assume that the participants have passed a course on space plasma physics and/or ionospheric physics including basic principles of measurements.

Topics covered (subject to change): Radars from ionosonde to IS; IS in context of radar applications; What is IS?; Why is IS special/different?; Requirements of IS measurements; Coherent vs. incoherent scatter; History of IS and first measurements; Hardware basics; Pulse coding and their possibilities; Access to EISCAT data. Moreover, the course will include some key examples of EISCAT application for different ionospheric regions as motivation and source of ideas for future users. There'll two sessions on the future, one of which will be dedicated to EISCAT 3D and the other to AMISR.

Second Week

The second week of the Radar School will take place at Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, which is one of the EISCAT UHF Radar Sites. The second week is a continuation of the first week of the school, but it addresses more technical issues including the radar hardware, the control software, the design of experiments. This part of the course targets future experimenters but also users who want to have more in-depth knowledge about EISCAT. The Sodankylä radar will be used for a demonstration experiment and radar data will be studied during practicals.

Topics covered (subject to change): EISCAT Hardware for experimenters (essential background information); Advanced IS application with respect to the EISCAT radars; Using the radars (EROS commands); Real-time monitoring of experiments (RTGraph); Real-time data analysis; Data post-processing and calibration; EISCAT software and file structures; Data storage and archiving. There'll be a special experiment conducted for the school and much of the lectures are given in form of practicals.