This project is a collaboration between scientists at four universities (Siena College The New Jersey Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, and the University of New Hampshire) to continue studies of the polar ionosphere and magnetosphere from Antarctica and magnetically conjugate regions in the Arctic. Magnetometer observations, high frequency (HF) cosmic noise absorption measurements (riometry) and auroral luminosity measurements will form the basis the investigations. The research efforts will involve extensive collaboration with other investigators using complementary data sets.
The project will operate magnetometers, imaging and broad-beam riometer, and 2-wavelength zenith photometers at South Pole and McMurdo Station in Antarctica. In addition the investigators will operate a monochromatic all-sky imager (ASI) at South Pole together with scientists from the National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR) in Japan. The project will also continue to provide the data acquisition systems at South Pole and McMurdo for the common recording of other geophysical data and the provision of these data to collaborating investigators. To enhance the usefulness and timeliness of these data to the general scientific community, web-based data portal will be upgraded so that the Antarctic data sets can be accessed in near-real time.
The overall objective is to understand the relevant physical processes that affect the flow of energy in the magnetosphere and high-latitude ionosphere. The project will improve our understanding of the internal and external (i.e. solar wind driven) plasma processes that control the flow of energy in geospace. Phenomena that will be studied under this award include magnetic storms, magnetic substorms, magnetospheric and ionospheric plasma instabilities, and energetic particle precipitation from the magnetosphere into the ionosphere.
The project provides opportunities for undergraduate students at the participating universities to be involved in scientific research that includes field work in Antarctica. The project also involves international relationships with science teams from Britain, Canada, Denmark/Greenland and Japan.
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance Expediation closed the "Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration" almost one hundred years ago when the Antarctic continent represented the frontier of human exploration. Today, this vast continent serves as a platform for a new generation of scientific explorers, especially in the broad domain of atmospheric and solar-terrestrial investigations, collectively known as geospace. Indeed, Antarctica provides unparalleled access to the Earth's geospace environment, a region that spans from the upper stratosphere into outer space…and beyond. Antarctica provides a fundamentally important observing platform critical for understanding the effects of the Sun on Planet Earth, and the potentially deleterious effects that have important societal and technological implications related to space weather. Unlike the northern polar-regions, the Antarctic continent provides a large land mass that supports observations at the highest geomagnetic latitudes, where energy from the solar wind easily penetrates Earth's magnetic field at the polar cap. In addition, due to the relative orientation of Earth's spin axis and its magnetic field, the so-called "auroral zone" remains in complete darkness throughout the day during the austral winter. This offset enables significant dayside observations of aurora to be acquired only in the Antarctic. Of further importance are inter-hemispheric differences in solar wind coupling to the geospace environment. Finally, the Antarctic enables studies that use Long Duration Balloons (LDB) that reveal information about Earth's radiation belts and energetic particle precipitation that drives aurora and atmospheric processes. It is important to note that LDB missions are more easily accomplished in the Antarctic due to the lack of geo-political boundaries and the spirit of scientific collaboration fostered by the Antarctic Treaty. Under this award, we continued operation of a suite of geospace instrumentation, consisting of fluxgate magnetometers, scintillation GPS receivers, imaging and broadband riometers, optical systems, and a variety of other instruments, currently located at both South Pole (SPA) and McMurdo (MCM) stations which have a sustained track-record of robust operation and community support. Data from this suite of instrumentation was synergistically combined to study: a) the synoptic variability of the magnetospheric open-closed boundary (OCB) and associated cusp structures (utilizing fluxgate, photometer, and imager data); b) study of simultaneous ELF whistler events at SPA and MCM on their relationship to ionospheric conditions (using ELF receiver, fluxgate, and GPS data); and c) auroral and polar cap scintillation occurrence, strength, and relationship with ITM activity (using GPS, fluxgate, riometer, imager, VLF and ELF data). We note that these particular topics are only a partial listing of the work that can, and will, be performed with data from this instrumentation. Additional planned collaborations with other projects taking place in Antarctica, and at nominally conjugate regions in the Arctic, include the MCM lidar system, the southern hemisphere SuperDARN radars, Fabry-Perot interferometers, the BARRELS balloon campaign, etc., and in orbit, including the THEMIS suite of spacecraft and the RBSP spacecraft, will make use of this data to provide context to their measurements. In addition to supporting the work of a productive collaborative team and supporting the efforts of both graduate and undergraduate students, we provided for synoptic data that other geospace research efforts utilized so as to better understand their own data. The investigators on this proposal mentored undergraduate student using Antarctic and Arctic data and there were numerous institutional opportunities for undergraduate involvement including field work in Antarctica. Finally, international relationships were fostered with science teams from Britain and Japan.
