EISCAT Norway

The Project

The EISCAT Norway project is funded by the Research Council of Norway (Contract no 350179 EISCAT2025)  to provide to researchers in Norway access to the EISCAT radars, providing a cutting-edge research infrastructure for basic research studies into the upper polar atmosphere / ionosphere and space near Earth.

The secondary objective is to facilitate the use of the infrastructure for space weather and space debris studies.

This project implements the Norwegian membership with the international EISCAT research infrastructure EISCAT AB. EISCAT AB operates radars for research into the Arctic ionosphere and the main radar sites are in Norway. A major new research facility, the EISCAT_3D radar is under implementation and when it is fully operational, the EISCAT instruments will comprise of EISCAT_3D stage 1, the EISCAT Svalbard Radar and supporting instruments. The EISCAT radars measure scattered radio waves from the ionosphere with high spatial and time resolution. EISCAT measureents facilitate space plasma physics studies, like the physical processes related to the northern lights, climate change and space weather. Meteors, atmospheric layers and space debris can also be measured. Users in Norway and other countries collaborate with and support the EISCAT AB in the development work on observation modes and data products. Using EISCAT will impact our understanding of basic processes that account for the dynamic geospace environment over the Arctic region. It will impact pressing societal concerns on the vulnerability of modern technological infrastructures to disruption and harm caused by space weather and space debris. The technological scope of the project creates opportunities to national industry and services in communications and information technologies. Broad impacts are expected in science and engineering education, especially by gibing students the hands-on contact with cutting edge science and technology. Cooperation that are established by individual user groups guarantee high flexibility and direct scientific exchange. International researcher groups are attracted to launch scientific sounding-rockets from Andøya Space for studies made in conjunction and with the support of the EISCAT radar infrastructure data.

Science Case

EISCAT_3D will be a world-leading international research infrastructure using the incoherent scatter technique to study the atmosphere in the Fenno-Scandinavian Arctic and to investigate how the Earth's atmosphere is coupled to space. The scientific applications also include climate change, space weather, plasma physics, space debris and near-Earth object studies. For their research with EISCAT_3D, the Norwegian EISCAT user community has identified five fundamental science questions:

• How to proceed beyond the present simplistic, static, stationary and homogeneous analysis of upper atmospheric and ionospheric processes?
• How does space weather affect ionospheric processes and how to support modelling and space weather services?
• How to advance fundamental plasma physics by employing the ionosphere as a natural plasma physics laboratory?
• How does the influx of extraterrestrial material interact with the upper atmosphere and where does the material originate from?
• How does solar activity couple from geospace into the lower atmosphere and climate system, and does this energy change the wave forcing of geospace from below?

Consortium Members EISCAT Norway

The Norwegian research consortium consists of:

• University of Tromsø (UiT)
• University of Bergen (UiB)
• University Center in Svalbard (UNIS)
• University of Oslo (UiO)
• Andøya Space Center

Prof. Ingrid Mann, UiT is leading the consortium.