This is a one-year effort to support the continued operation of a network of research magnetometer stations along the west coast of Greenland. The main objective is to prevent a gap in the operation of these stations during the transition in responsibility from the Danish Meteorological Institute to the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark that has been initiated recently. The bridging support provided with this effort will maintain these stations during the next year while the Danish National Space Institute (DNSI) secures research funding to continue the support and operation of these stations. DNSI has already obtained support to continue the operation of the three full geomagnetic observatories in Greenland. This provides an infrastructure in place within Greenland so that only modest additional support is required to operate the additional 9 magnetic variometer research stations along the western coast.
The observations from this network constitute a longstanding valuable asset to the international space physics research community. Amongst other, they provide important context information for many studies being conducted with the NSF Incoherent Scatter Radar in Sondre Stromfjord. Currently, they also form an essential part of inter-hemispherical comparative studies conducted with recently installed and planned magnetometers and other geophysical observation stations in Antarctica, which are deployed at locations exactly designed to form a hemispherical conjugate constellation to the Greenland network. An extended gap in this data source would cause significant complications and delay the progress on a large number of ongoing and planned research projects.
The project will be carried out in close collaboration between researchers in the US and Denmark and also includes travel support for a student from the US to work with the Danish team over the summer.
Background: The Greenland West Coast Magnetometer Chain consists of 9 magnetometer stations and 3 geomagnetic observatories. The station locations are unique, extending approximately from the geomagnetic north pole through the polar cap and cusp region to the auroral zone. On the dayside of the Earth, the magnetic field lines from the locations of these stations map to the regions where the solar wind first encounters the Earth’s magnetic field. In separately funded research, Virginia Tech is developing and deploying autonomous instruments in the Antarctic to be magnetically conjugate to the Greenland West Coast Chain in order to study the global electrodynamic systems that couple energy from the solar wind to the Earth’s magnetosphere and polar ionospheres. There are asymmetries between the winter and summer polar hemispheres in terms of conductivity, field strength, and the resulting electrical coupling current systems that will be investigated using these two conjugate chains. During 2009, responsibility for the operation of the Greenland geomagnetic observatories was transferred from the Danish Meteorological Institute to the Danish Space Institute at the Danish Technical University. Responsibility for the other magnetic variation stations was also transferred, but without funding since these stations are research stations to be operated out of funded research proposals. These stations are essential to the research being jointly conducted by researchers at the Danish Space Institute and Virginia Tech. The support from this RAPID award provided bridging support to continue the operation of the magnetic variation stations while the Danish Space Institute obtained national research support for the operation of these stations. In addition, this award supported a Virginia Tech graduate student spend over 1 month at the Danish Space Institute to learn about the methods to process the Greenland magnetometer data, including baseline determination, spike removal, and validation methods. These techniques will be applied to the magnetic variation data obtained by the conjugate Antarctic chain. The majority of the funds in this award were provided to the Danish Space Institute via a subcontract to be used for preliminary data handling, final data processing, and maintenance of the magnetic variation stations during this transition year. Major maintenance tasks were required at three of the stations and minor tasks at two of the stations. New software for preliminary and final processing of the variation station data was written in 2010 and in early 2011. The new software performs the following functions: - convert raw data files from data logger to CDF-format (a NASA owned format popular in the community) - plotting of magnetometer data and housekeeping data - visual comparison between magnetometer stations - correction for known timing errors (only relevant for data prior to April 2010) - manual flagging of invalid/valid and preliminary/definitive data - calibration of data - conversion to ASCII, matlab or cdf-files for raw variometer data and calibrated data All data from January 2011 to May 2011 and beyond has been processed and are available. Earlier data (May to December 2010) from several station has also been processed and are available. Data during this period from the remaining stations are currently being processed.
