SuperDARN Iceland: First Light

The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is global network scientific HF radars located in the northern and southern hemisphere. The network has expanded over the past several solar cycles to now include more than 30 radars. The primary purpose of SuperDARN is to measure plasma convection in the F-region over a large portion of the Earth's polar regions, however, data from the network have been used in numerous studies of various magnetosphere, ionosphere, thermosphere, space weather and terrestrial phenomena. Although hardware and software designs differ among individual radars, each radar produces a common data product that allows for measurements, distributed over the polar regions, to be easily combined together to produce global-scale maps
of convection. As part of a continued network expansion, construction of two SuperDARN radars in Iceland was recently completed. These radars, ICW and ICE, are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of a collaboration with Virginia Tech, the University of Alaska - Fairbanks (now Penn State) and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to construct eight SuperDARN radars at four separate sites, including Hays, Kansas (FHW/FHE); Christmas Valley, Oregon (CVW/CVE) and Adak, Alaska (ADW/ADE). The ICW and ICE radars are located near Pykkvibaer, Iceland, the site of the PYK SuperDARN radar, constructed in 1995 and operated by Leicester University. A second
SuperDARN radar (STO), located near Stokkseyri, Iceland, was completed in 1994 and operated by CNRS, IRAP and Lancaster University. The PYK and STO radars were decommissioned in 2018 and 2019. The fields-of-view ICW and ICE encompass those of PYK and STO, fill in the poleward gap between these radars, expand coverage equatorward and overlap with various ground-based
instrumentation in the Scandinavian sector; including EISCAT_3D. ICW and ICE are ideally situated to make measurements of polar cap and polar cusp phenomena, as well as providing critical measurements of plasma motion in this sector for large-scale convection maps. First light was achieved on January 24, 2023 and the impact on convection maps was immediate. Examples of the first data from the newest SuperDARN radars are shown.