The Chatanika and Sondrestrom Radars – a brief history

摘要

The Sondrestrom upper atmospheric research facility, located just north ofthe Arctic Circle near the west coast of Greenland, will soon celebrate 30 yrof operations. The centerpiece of the facility, an incoherent scatterradar, has collected 46 000 h of data on the ionospheric stateparameters. This instrument was designed and built to measure the effects ofnuclear bombs on radio wave propagation in the South Pacific, but insteadwas deployed to Alaska to study the effects of auroral structuring on theionosphere, and was later moved to Greenland to explore the auroral cusp andthe dynamics of the polar cap boundary. This is the story of the birth andgenesis of the instrument, its travels, and the evolution of its facility.