2008 Workshop:Research Opportunities at Millstone Hill Observatory
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Research Opportunities at Millstone Hill Observatory
Contents |
Location
Interlaken
Date/Time
1300-1500 Thursday 19 June 2008
Conveners
Format of the Workshop
short presentations and audience discussions
Duration
2 hours (default)
Estimated attendance
30+
Conflicts with other workshops
avoid other ISR workshop times
(Jicamarca, Arecibo) and World Day Scheduling, plus Lind/Urbina technology workshop and Coster/Ruohoniemi PBL workshop; schedule in last half of week to allow some GEM overlap participation
Special technology requests
none
Forum
Comments, Questions, Discussion Forum
Brief Initial Description
The Millstone Hill incoherent scatter radar (ISR) forms the core of Millstone Hill Observatory, an NSF Upper Atmospheric Facility located at MIT Haystack Observatory near Boston, Massachusetts. Located at 55 degrees geomagnetic latitude, the facility is well positioned for the study of mid-latitude and sub-auroral ionospheric processes. This includes excellent radar coverage of the complex and dynamic plasmasphere boundary layer region, with fields of view extending beyond 1500 km range for F-region observations. The Millstone Hill facility provides a range of capabilities including active radar, passive optics, global GPS TEC mapping, passive radar, and ionospheric sounding. These allow comprehensive plasmasphere and inner magnetosphere studies in areas of considerable and current interest within the space science research community. Examples include magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, fundamental aeronomy, long term ionospheric trends, geomagnetic storm response, space weather effects, and the dynamics of thermosphere-ionosphere and lower-upper atmospheric coupling.
This workshop will focus on opportunities for the CEDAR and GEM communities to conduct high impact science using Millstone Hill's facilities. Using short organizing presentations, we will describe observatory capabilities now and into the upcoming solar maximum period. The bulk of time will be devoted to interactive, science discussions aimed at stimulating community ideas on the ways in which mid-latitude science can advance outstanding questions in upper atmospheric research, leading to a greater system-level understanding of the atmosphere-magnetosphere-ionosphere environment. We will also provide practical information on how to utilize Millstone Hill facilities, experiments, and data in ongoing research programs and interests. Overviews will be targeted at appropriate levels to accommodate the full range of CEDAR/GEM community members, from students to veteran researchers.
Final agenda
1. Millstone Hill Facility Overview and One-Slide Science [Phil Erickson]
2. Science Opportunities at Mid-Latitudes:
a. Space Weather effects at mid-latitudes [Anthea Coster]
b. Plasmasphere Boundary Layer effects [Phil Erickson]
c. Ionospheric variability at mid-latitudes [Michael Mendillo]
d. Mid-latitude plasma processes [Jean-Pierre St. Maurice]
3. Future Visions and Plans at Millstone Hill:
a. Optics Program [John Noto]
b. MARS [Frank Lind]
4. Audience questions / discussion / summary
Workshop summary
The 2008 CEDAR Workshop "Research Opportunities at Millstone Hill Observatory" highlighted the range of exciting science possible at mid-latitudes, with a special focus on the capabilities of the mid-latitude Millstone Hill CEDAR Class 1 Facility and how they can be used to address outstanding and unresolved science questions.
Phil Erickson began the workshop by describing the Class I CEDAR instrumentation available at Millstone Hill, including the NSF Upper Atmospheric Facilities supported incoherent scatter radar with full local, regional, and wide coverage plasma profile capability and a spatial range from the northern Canadian maritimes to just north of Puerto Rico. The MIT maintained MADRIGAL distributed database is available as well to serve data from Millstone and other ISRs and to place measurements in regional and mesoscale context, using ancillary instrumentation such as GPS TEC maps, ISIS RF capture platforms, and a virtual empirical ionospheric model suite. The Millstone Hill ISR database spans more than 4 solar cycles and contains specific unique data sets (30 day runs, biweekly 30 hour IPY observations, stratospheric warming campaigns) ideal for multiple climatology, model/data comparison, and storm studies.
Phil continued with broad "one-slide science" coverage of topics with significant unexplained features in the mid-latitude ionosphere: the role of plasmasphere boundary layers at mid latitudes in disturbance electric field penetration, long term ionospheric trends and climatologies, mid-latitude tidal studies with multiple observations and models, lower-upper atmosphere coupling during stratwarm events, and mid-latitude traveling ionospheric disturbance (TID) studies using multiple techniques. All of these science topics are the subject of community focus and separate workshops, and have plenty of unsolved problems appropriate for new researchers and students.
Anthea Coster described significant mid-latitude space weather effects over the heavily populated continental US, focusing on geophysically driven storm-enhanced density (SED) structures and the sub-auroral polarization stream (SAPS), along with resultant effects on operational systems such as maritime differential GPS and other navigation systems. She emphasized that the statistical nature and individual event characteristics of these effects are of crucial importance and relevance to the wider community as well as CEDAR.
Phil Erickson returned to describe the wide range of mid-latitude physics within the plasmasphere boundary layer, at the interface between the auroral magnetosphere and the ionosphere/thermosphere dominated inner region. He covered in more detail outstanding questions regarding SED, SAPS, wave/particle interactions, and optically driven hallmarks of magnetosphere/ionosphere coupling such as stable auroral red arcs (SAR arcs). A wide list of unanswered puzzles about PBL dynamics followed which address the full range of magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere coupling effects, all hot topics in the CEDAR and GEM communities from mesoscales to microscales.
Michael Mendillo next presented some thoughts on ionospheric variability at mid-latitudes, focusing on comparisons of models and long duration incoherent scatter radar runs. Comparisons of TIME-GCM and ionosonde records at mid-latitudes reveal that variability has interesting features which do not always correlate in a straightforward manner to the presence or absence of geomagnetic activity, as one would initially think. Long duration runs from the Millstone Hill ISR present a valuable resource to resolve this puzzle, especially as some of these present full vector velocity/electric field as well as altitude dependent ion and neutral temperature information.
Jean-Pierre St. Maurice then contributed a wide range of thoughts on mid-latitude plasma wave structures and resulting coherent backscatter techniques for probing these with ground based radars. He emphasized that a vast number of mid-latitude puzzles exist, such as radar echoes from small scale structures within thin layers, where localization with respect to gradients is not always as expected. So-called trough echoes in the middle of the plasmasphere boundary layer also require further study, as their generation mechanism has not been completely pinned down. Finally, both the E and F region ionosphere require much further study to elucidate the drivers of wave structures. In particular, SED events may have enough gradients and electric fields to trigger interchange instabilities.
The session concluded with two presentations on the future plans and vision for the Millstone Hill facility. John Noto (SSI) described the large number of upgrade paths and plans for the passive optics facility at Millstone, with several new red line and green line capabilities coming online soon providing both airglow intensity and all-sky imaging capability for winds. Frank Lind described the concept and plans for the Millstone Advanced Radar System (MARS), being developed with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and others as a next generation phased array architecture. MARS is a broadband array design with highly integrated all-digital receiver and exciters at the individual radar element level backed by supercomputing signal processing. The design retains wide field coverage and scanning capabilities, and the MARS concept is a multi-role instrument with ionosphere / upper atmosphere radar, radio astronomy, lower atmosphere, and heliosphere application. MARS is currently the subject of ongoing technical studies, and will represent a significant advance in Millstone Hill's capabilities.
Audience questions were addressed throughout the presentations, and the participants left with a greater understanding of the enormous range of unexplored science possible in the exciting and dynamic mid-latitude region.
Presentation Resources
Contact Phil Erickson [1].
