History of the Tromsø Ionosphere Heating facility

We present the historical background to the construction of a major ionospheric heating facility near Tromsø, Norway in the 1970s by the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy and the subsequent operational history to the present. It was built next to the EISCAT incoherent scatter radar facility and in a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rietveld, Michael T., Stubbe, Peter
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-2021-19
https://hgss.copernicus.org/preprints/hgss-2021-19/
Description
Summary:We present the historical background to the construction of a major ionospheric heating facility near Tromsø, Norway in the 1970s by the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy and the subsequent operational history to the present. It was built next to the EISCAT incoherent scatter radar facility and in a region with a multitude of diagnostic instruments used to study the auroral region. The facility was transferred to the EISCAT Scientific Association in January 1993 and continues to provide new discoveries in plasma physics and ionospheric and atmospheric science to this day. It is expected that ‘Heating’ will continue operating together with the new generation of incoherent scatter radar, called EISCAT_3D, when it is commissioned in the near future.