The investigators will continue operating and maintaining the Sondrestrom upper atmosphere research facility located near Kangerlussuaq, on the west coast of Greenland. The management, operation, and maintenance of the facility includes all technical aspects of the incoherent-scatter (IS) radar, the Rayleigh and resonance lidars, and the all-sky imager. The investigators will also provide the vision for science, service, education, and leadership of the facility. Plans for the operation of the facility include evolutionary development of the facility with further implementation of state-of-the-art radar data acquisition and processing schemes that are becoming practicable with new technology, further advancements in lidar and all-sky imager capabilities, upgrades in telescience capabilities, and improvements to the facility infrastructure that will enable key instrument deployments in the future. To provide an environment that promotes education and training, an education advisory board, consisting of a group of diversified, education research experts, will be established to determine and develop the most effective way of formulating, implementing, communicating and disseminating information and data to public and educational institutions. Also, a post-doctoral program will help train the future research professionals in ionospheric physics, and the existing graduate student research experience program will be augmented to increase student involvement. To foster new ideas in upper atmospheric research, the investigators will support advanced instrumentation to promote scientific discovery, ensure data are of high research quality, and maintain expertise in the related sciences conducted at the facility. The specific areas of research include efforts to investigate the response and variability of the high-latitude ionosphere from seconds to solar cycles, the exploration of the ionosphere's role in the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere system, and the deciphering of the myriad processes occurring in the mesosphere/lower thermosphere-ionosphere region. To respond to the evolving needs of the community, the facility will provide flexibility in radar operations to capture space weather events, and make more data available for retrospective analysis. In addition to the contribution these observations will make to the data acquired by the longitudinal chain of IS radars, the utility of grouping the existing and planned high-latitude radars will be exploited. Thus, the Sondrestrom facility will be made an element of a high-latitude IS radar consortium to optimize coordinated operations and encourage the exchange of scientific and technical developments among the IS radar facilities. The investigators will provide ready access to real-time data products, immediate analysis of 20 years of radar data, and assimilation of radar data into physics-based community models. The investigators will develop a data handling and processing strategy that will provide the first comprehensive statistical view of the high-latitude ionosphere by IS radar. In addition to enabling scientific research with the Sondrestrom facility, the investigators will schedule and operate the radar; maintain and upgrade the radar and lidar as necessary; plan and design experiments for the radar, lidar, and all-sky imager; coordinate user visits and provide logistics support; act as scientific, technical, and logistic liaisons for user experiments; sustain high-quality data products; preserve a comprehensive data library; provide data to qualified researchers; maintain, enhance, and develop software for acquiring, reducing, and interpreting data; collaborate with scientists; serve as science liaison to the Greenland Home Rule Government, Danish Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland, and the National Science Foundation, and employ highly qualified site personnel.
