EISCAT 3D Norway

E3D is a world-class radar facility for investigations of the geospace environment. E3D will use the incoherent scattering (IS) technique to make 3-dimensional vector measurements across a wide field of view of key parameters in the auroral atmosphere by taking advantage of technological advances in radio, radar, computing, and signal analysis.

The Project
The EISCAT_3D Norway project is funded by the Research Council of Norway (Contract no 245683) to facilitate participation in the EISCAT_3D international research infrastructure project. In 2008 EISCAT_3D was selected as infrastructure for environmental research for the European Commission ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) roadmap. The EISCAT_3D phased-array radar system will be operated by, and will be an integral part of the international EISCAT Scientific Association that is currently operated with participation from China, Finland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

The Norwegian Research Council will fund the infrastructure with 288 MNOK where 228 MNOK is for investments and 60 MNOK is for the Norwegian share of operational costs until 2024.

The Infrastructure
E3D will be a new instrument emerging from the present EISCAT infrastructure. E3D will be the most advanced Incoherent Scatter radar endowed with two unique innovations: (1) 3-dimensional vector imaging and (2) arbitrary transmitter modulation capabilities. The first is made possible by the multi-site configuration with one active site and four passive sites and by electronic scanning and beam-forming capabilities provided by the five phased steered array antennas with about 10,000 antenna elements each. The active site will be equipped with smaller outlying antenna arrays that will provide aperture synthesis imaging to acquire sub-beam spatial transverse resolution, only partly matched by the Jicamarca radar in Peru. After full implementation, the active array's peak transmitter power will be unsurpassed at 10 MW and high duty cycle at 233 MHz. The combination of the antenna gain and the transmitter power will improve the monostatic sensitivity by a factor greater than 20 (with respect to EISCAT's UHF radar).

The E3D Norwegian site will be located in Skibotn.

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_3D Norway

The Norwegian research consortium consists of:

• University of Tromsø (UiT)
• University of Bergen (UiB)
• University Center in Svalbard (UNIS)
• University of Oslo (UiO)
• Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
• Andøya Space Center

Prof. Ingrid Mann, UiT is leading the consortium.