EISCAT Campaign in Tromsø

Time for the traditional Finnish autumn EISCAT campaign! Ilkka Virtanen and I have been running radar experiments since last Friday evening, from the control room of the Ramfjord site near Tromsø, Norway. This is the site where the EISCAT transmitters are located: the VHF – which may be used alongside the Sodankylä and Kiruna receivers for tri-static measurements –, the UHF, and the ionospheric heating system (among other instruments).

Four experiments from the Finnish EISCAT user community were scheduled for this campaign. A first experiment consisted in a continuous 48-hour run of the EISCAT Svalbard Radar (ESR) during a solar wind high-speed stream. It was run in the beginning of this month, separately from the rest of the campaign. The second experiment aimed at using the UHF radar in a 3-position scanning mode to study neutral wind acceleration during auroral activity. The third experiment was supposed to use UHF, VHF, remote VHF receivers, ESR and the Kilpisjärvi Atmospheric Imaging Receiver Array (KAIRA) to cover SWARM satellite overpasses during two nights. The fourth experiment was supposed to study the lower ionosphere during pulsating aurora, using the VHF system.

Unfortunately, as this is often the case, reality reserves some surprises. In our case, these were not particularly good ones, since the KAIRA clock experiences some time drift, probably because its rubidium atomic clock needs to be replaced. Just to make sure that we have no regrets about it, the VHF is also down due to problems with a coaxial cable. As a consequence, the experiments using the VHF system could not be run as planned: the SWARM experiment only used field-aligned UHF measurements and ESR, and the pulsating aurora experiment had to be totally cancelled.

As a form of compensation, we have been granted exceptional weather here in Tromsø – while on the Finnish side of the border, thick clouds offer an uninterrupted display of medium-grey and dark-grey. And at night, the aurora gave us several nice displays during the previous nights. Some form of compensation, indeed.

The UHF radar, the aurora, and a mysterious beam of light.
Photo: M. Grandin

PhD Defence in One Minute

We have made a time-lapse video of Dr Lassi Roininen's PhD defence on 16th June, 2015. The actual event was slightly longer than the video linked here, which compresses proceedings into one minute. Then we've attached a time-lapse of the subsequent coffee as well. Thus if you weren't in Sodankylä to witness the event live, you can now catch up in a minute and a half in total. Enjoy!

And with this video, we wish all of you a very nice Midsummer Weekend!

Time-lapse: Thomas Ulich.

Congratulations, Dr Lassi Roininen!

On 16th June, 2015, at Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, Dr Lassi Roininen successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled "Discretisation-invariant and computationally efficient correlation priors for Bayesian inversion."

Sincere congratulations to you, Lassi, and all the best for your future career!

The opponents were Professor Håvard Rue of NTNU/Trondheim, Norway, and Professor Jouko Lampinen of Aalto University, Finland. The defence was chaired by Professor Markku Lehtinen.

After the formal defence ceremony, everyone was invited first for coffee and excellent cake, and later in the evening the traditional "karonkka" commenced with lots of good food, drink, live music, drink, tinned music, drink, sauna, drink, more sauna... – and a good time was had until the early hours of the next morning.

By the way, for members of the Finnish Inverse Problems Society (FIPS) there are two doctoral hats, the top hat with with the insignia of the University, and then the even more prestigious hat issued by FIPS, which is different for every new PhD. The photo shows Lassi starting to relax after the coffee event wearing the white hard hat of a team leader. Quite a good choice!

Photo: Mikko Orispää.

An EISCAT cake at the Northernmost Baking Competition

Last Sunday, a group of students at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) organised a baking competition – which they assumed to be the northernmost one, with rather high chances of being right. Fifteen teams came up with their masterpieces, competing in three different categories: best taste, best design/creativity and unexpected ingredient.

It must be said that the level was pretty high, and the event attracted about seventy students to the third-floor kitchen of the Sjøskrenten student housing to be judges and vote for their favourite cakes after conscientious tasting.

The ESR cake, by the Collisional Quenchers

The Arctic Geophysics Master and PhD students, aka the Collisional Quenchers, proudly managed to get to the third place in the best design/creativity category! Their EISCAT Svalbard Radar (ESR) cake indeed made a great impression on the audience, although this could not compete with the very professional-looking Russian Mine Cake, by far ranking first. Had there been a nerdy category in the competition, though, they would surely have won!

The Russian Mine Cake, winner in the best design/creativity category

The History of Svalbard course (and its unexpected Royal visitor)

This week and the previous one, an excellent twenty-hour course on the history of Svalbard is being given at UNIS by Dr Thor B. Arlov, who is also the Pro-Rector for Research at NTNU (Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet) in Trondheim, Norway. The lectures take place every evening and are open to the Longyearbyen public as well.

During these two weeks, the Svalbard Museum allows the students who take this course to visit the expositions for free. It provides very interesting illustration of the different activities which brought people to Svalbard after its discovery by Willem Barentsz in 1596: whaling, hunting, coal mining, and ultimately research and tourism. One session focused on the development of scientific research on Svalbard, from Chichagov's expedition in 1764–1766 until the establishment of UNIS in 1993 and the installation of the first antenna of the EISCAT Svalbard Radar in 1996.

The (cosy) interior of a Russian trapper's house

The course also describes the expeditions to(wards) the North Pole which departed from Svalbard during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and it discusses the specific administration and status of the archipelago within the kingdom of Norway.

By the way, this week, Queen Sonja of Norway is in Longyearbyen and has been visiting many of the local facilities, including UNIS, the Kjell Henriksen Observatory and the Svalbard Museum. She even attended about half an hour of yesterday's course! And – mere coincidence – that part of the lecture dealt with... the process by which Svalbard was integrated into the kingdom of Norway, and how its local administration has been evolving, until the creation of the local council (lokalstyret) in 2002.

Hilsen fra Longyearbyen

78°13'N. This is the geographic latitude of Longyearbyen, the main human settlement on Spitsbergen, where the University Centre on Svalbard (aka UNIS) provides first-class teaching for Bachelor, Master and PhD students in Arctic-related topics. The teaching and research carried out at UNIS are divided into four departments: Arctic Biology, Arctic Geology, Arctic Geophysics and Arctic Technology. Each year, a few hundred students from all around the world come to take part of their degree in this very peculiar environment, where unique opportunities to carry out field work in the extreme Arctic are provided.

I am presently enrolled as a student at UNIS in Arctic Geophysics to take two courses (The Upper Polar Atmosphere; Radar Diagnostics of Space Plasma). The courses include practical sessions at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO, auroral station) and in the EISCAT on Svalbard Radar (ESR) next month. 

Eventually, the sun will rise. Someday. Or so we hope.

The whole last week was dedicated to the Arctic Survival and Safety course, mandatory for all the spring semester students and aimed at providing them with the necessary knowledge and skills to carry out field work safely on Svalbard.

The extreme Arctic is full of hazards due to weather conditions and the remoteness of most of the regions of the archipelago. The students who are part of an expedition outside Longyearbyen must therefore be aware of the risks they may face and be able to act efficiently if in a difficult situation. Besides the polar bears — which although dangerous do not represent the most serious threat —, the deadly hazards awaiting for human beings are numerous: crevasses in glaciers, weak sea ice, avalanches, fragile ice caves, walruses... without mentioning the cold, the wind and the absence of resources.

The lessons included a lot of practical training, especially to rescue victims of an avalanche or fallen in a sea ice hole or in a crevasse, including first aid techniques and building of an emergency camp. Another session was dedicated to telecommunication and navigation, as in most cases the only way to call for help is to use an emergency beacon and/or a satellite phone.

On Saturday, the students were taken to Longyearbreen, a glacier very near Longyearbyen, for a full day of practice. Fortunately, it was not windy on the glacier, which helped withstanding the cold and setting up the camps. After rotating over five rescuing and survival tasks, all the students were invited to observe a demonstration of a rescue operation by a Super Puma helicopter. Pictures of that day were taken by Stefan Claes, who was one of the instructors during the week; see here.

After this very busy and intense week, the regular courses can now start. And I guess for all the students this safety course was an amazing experience and a fantastic training for both their field work expeditions and their private excursions.

Research Ethics

Euthanasia, animal testing, biofuels, Milgram experiment... Although in physics we do not have the same ethical issues as in biology, medical science or psychology, there are quite a few situations a physicist encounters in his scientific life which require being careful, be it while processing data, publishing a paper or making public statements. This blog post itself has been ethics-checked with the utmost care and contains no plagiarism nor bear any kind of conflict of interest.

In the University of Oulu, all the doctoral students are required to take a Scientific Research and Ethics course during their PhD. For some of them, it is a topic they never dealt with before.

THINK BY THEMSELVES

This course consists of a couple of general lectures introducing the concept of ethics from a philosophical point of view, followed by several field-specific lectures. This enables to treat differently the students in medicine or biology who may open people or animals to publish scientific papers, students in humanities who may make statistics from personal data to publish scientific papers and students in physics or mathematics who may publish scientific papers. Finally, a group work on a research-ethics-related topic and leading to a presentation during a seminar allows the students to think by themselves about what ethics involves, based on a concrete case.

And for those students who may fail this ethics course in this autumn term, another one will be held next spring. In Finnish. Lesson no. 1: don't mix it with vinegar.

Submitting a First Paper

A first achievement after several months of work, the submission of a first paper is definitely a major step in a PhD student's life. "I have been working on this manuscript for more than half a year", the author Maxime Grandin reveals. "I actually started this project during my Master's thesis, in early 2013. I am glad we managed to continue developing this model thanks to this collaboration SGO initiated with IRAP [Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie] in Toulouse through my PhD."

The paper is about a new approach for radio-occultation data analysis, based on the example of the radio science experiments onboard Mars Express. Radio-occultation experiments consist in probing the neutral atmosphere and the ionosphere of a planet using the propagation of radio waves between the spacecraft orbiting the planet and a receiver on Earth. As the radio wave propagates within the planetary envelope, it undergoes a slight deflection due to the varying refractive index of the medium. This deflection can be estimated via the residual Doppler shift which is measured at the receiver, compared to the expected Doppler shift for a straight-line propagation of the wave. "Usually, such measurements are treated as an inverse problem to retrieve the electron density profile in the ionosphere and the neutral density and temperature profiles in the lower atmosphere," Maxime explains. "But with the coauthors of this manuscript, who were my Master's thesis supervisors at IRAP and ESTEC [European Space Research and Technology Centre, Noordwijk, Netherlands], we decided to adopt a direct approach by simulating the ray propagation between the spacecraft and the ground receiver during an experiment, in order to try to reproduce the measurements." 

No doubt that the PhD student was very eager to complete this first manuscript of his. Feverishly, as he got the green light from each of the coauthors, he undertook the submission process to a peer-reviewed journal in geophysics. The first paper is a special one, and the author needs taking a deep breath before clicking the final button. "I published my first paper as a Master's student, in the early 1980s," Esa Turunen recalls. "It was about a model I developed in Fortran 77 to describe the strongly-interacting matter with a two-phase approach. Particle physics! It took two years to complete the model; it was a very complex formulation," the present director of SGO recollects.

While the reviewing process runs its course, besides checking its status every other hour, the young PhD student will focus on a study about solar wind high-speed streams influence on the high-latitude ionosphere, which may bring him a second paper by the end of this year. Or at least so he hopes.