SuperDARN Canada: Recent advances in ground-based space weather monitoring

The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is a collection of 40+ high-frequency radars spanning both hemispheres. For over 30 years, SuperDARN has constantly monitored the high-latitude ionosphere for changes due to the interaction of Earth’s magnetic field with the solar wind, offering one of the most extensive space-weather datasets in existence.

In the past few years, SuperDARN radars operated by the University of Saskatchewan (SuperDARN Canada) have had their capabilities vastly improved due to the implementation of software-defined radio systems. This upgrade moves complex transmit and receive functionality from the analogue domain into digital, allowing vastly enhanced flexibility in experiment design.

In this talk, some of the new capabilities of the digital SuperDARN radars will be highlighted, including experiments that offer multi-static radar imaging, a 16x temporal resolution improvement, and collaborations with satellite missions and ground-based optics. These experiments open the door for a new generation of studies in ionospheric physics, as there is no compromise to the spatial coverage of the radars.