Radar School 2016 - Extended Deadline 15.03

The deadline for submitting applications to the Incoherent Scatter Radar School jointly organised by EISCAT (Europe) and NSF (US) is extended until 15th March. The school will be held in Sodankylä from 24th to 30th July 2016.

Candidates who have not yet sent their application are invited to follow the instructions on the following webpages:

- EISCAT participants: http://www.sgo.fi/Events/RS2016/index.php

- US participants: http://www.amisr.com/workshop

For any inquiries, please contact RS2016(at)sgo.fi (EISCAT/SGO) or summerschool@esd.sri.com (US NSF).

Selected participants will be notified by 29th March 2016.

Blue and green: Sodankylä in July.
Photo: M. Grandin

International Incoherent Scatter Radar School: Sodankylä 2016

We have the pleasure to announce the upcoming International Incoherent Scatter Radar School on 24–30 July 2016. This summer school will be held in Sodankylä, and is jointly organised by the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory and SRI International. It is sponsored by the EISCAT Scientific Association and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

The purpose of the summer school is to provide graduate and advanced undergraduate students with a solid background on the incoherent scatter radars, from the underlying theory of incoherent scatter to the design of radar experiments and data analysis, with a strong practical component. In particular, the students will be given the opportunity to design and run their own experiments using the EISCAT radar system, and then to analyse their data sets.

The school will be organised as follows. The lectures will take place during the morning sessions, from Monday 25 until Friday 29 July. The afternoon sessions will be dedicated to hands-on work in  small groups, with the objectives of designing a radar experiment suitable to study a chosen physical phenomenon, and of analysing the obtained data accordingly. There will also be many opportunities for students to directly interact with the lecturers during these sessions. The experiments will be run during the 26-27 July night. On Saturday 30 July morning, the groups will present their results to all  the summer school participants.

The school will take place near the beautiful banks of the river Kitinen.

Photo: M. Grandin

All students will be hosted at the local vocational school in Sodankylä, and meals (breakfasts, lunches and dinners) will be provided.

The deadline for submitting an application is 6 March 2016. The selected participants will be notified by 29 March 2016.

More information and detailed instructions for application can be found on the following webpages:

- EISCAT participants: http://www.sgo.fi/Events/RS2016/index.php

- US participants: http://www.amisr.com/workshop

For any inquiries, please contact RS2016(at)sgo.fi (EISCAT/SGO) or summerschool(at)esd.sri.com (US NSF).

The Arecibo Radiotelescope

From 21 to 26 July, the National Science Foundation and the EISCAT Scientific Association organised the 2014 Incoherent Scatter Radar Summer School in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The Finnish delegation comprised Thomas Ulich (lecturer and organiser, SGO), Antti Kero (lecturer, SGO), Anita Aikio (lecturer, University of Oulu) and myself (student, SGO).

It was such an incredible experience to have this summer school in the legendary Arecibo Observatory by the very edge of the 305-m-wide spherical dish which was built in 1964. This radiotelescope has provided the scientific community with extremely high-quality data in ionosphere physics, radio astronomy and planet and asteroid imaging.

The platform hanging 150 m above the bottom of the dish thanks to strong cables contains two receivers: the line feed and the Gregorian dome. The access to the platform is visible on the top-right-hand corner of the picture below. During the week, the summer school participants were given the chance to get onto that platform.

Picture realised by merging ten photographs of small bits of the radar

Besides the amazing location, this summer school was a great success and provided a unique opportunity for students in ionosphere physics from all around the world (Europe, United States, Japan, China, Peru, Ethiopia...) to meet. 

Many thanks to the organisers and the lecturers (may they find an equally extraordinary place for the next summer school)!

A soprano of the Arecibo Observatory Coquí Choir (daily performances starting around 19:30)

Two Sodankyläläistä in Oulu (cont.)

After four days in the University of Oulu, the premises start to appear less and less hostile and labyrinth-like, and most of our brain capacity can thus be allocated to the modern statistical methods.

They were all gone

The topics covered during the summer school provide a valuable overview of the tools and techniques that any scientist who deals with data may need to implement someday.

The first day was mainly an introduction to the concepts of probability, likelihood and statistics, with a particular focus on the two possible paradigms (frequentist and bayesian) and their different philosophies. The second day, the lectures dealt with parametric modelling and statistical inferences, while the main topic of the third day was regression and curve fitting. Finally, measurement uncertainty analysis, Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, time series analysis and spatial statistics were on the programme of the last two days.

The Secret Map

Every afternoon, a couple of hours were dedicated to practicals directly related to the examples considered during the lectures. These exercises were implemented in R. R is a free software programming language specially designed for statistics, which contains a great amount of useful packages. In addition, R enables to obtain nice and highly-tailorable plots.

TOO OPTIMISTIC PRIORS

About forty students were taking part to this summer school, with various backgrounds from biology to quantum physics. As not everybody knew one another, a "get-together" evening was organised by Exactus at some bar downtown on Wednesday evening, with a concert of the Groovesisters, a local duo (keyboard and drums). It turned out that, albeit statisticians, the organisers had set slightly too optimistic priors regarding the number of students who would join in. As only eleven of them showed up, and as about eighty free-drink tickets had been bought, let us say that we did not run short of beer...

It was slightly cloudy

After this pretty intense yet fruitful week, the homesickness has become unbearable, and soon will we be driving north to enjoy the colourful ruska and go picking lingonberries.

Two Sodankyläläistä in Oulu

This week, the Exactus doctoral programme of the University of Oulu Graduate School (also known as UniOGS) organises a summer school around modern statistical methods for natural scientists. Exactus coordinates the doctoral training of students preparing a PhD in so-called "exact sciences", namely astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics and statistics. Incidentally, two of the members of the SGO staff who are currently preparing their PhDs within the Exactus doctoral programme are taking part to this summer school.

Statistics can provide the scientists with highly-valuable tools and methods which may not seem absolutely straightforward at first glance to the neophyte. Yet, the most confusing aspects encountered during the first day turned out not to be mathematical ones but had rather to do with finding directions inside the university buildings.

Entering the R gate

A FOUR-STOREY BUILDING

Let us just recall a few key figures. Slightly more than 15,000 students are studying in the University of Oulu. Population of Tähtelä: about 60 people (during working hours, in the peak season). Characteristic dimensions and main facts of the Polaria main building in Sodankylä: 60 x 60 x 7 m, two storeys, two corridors, about thirty rooms. In comparison, the Linnanmaa campus main building is more of the order of 300 x 400 x 15 m, with four storeys, too many corridors and an infinity (or so) of rooms. No wonder why such a vast and overcrowded place traumatised those two Tähtelä guys far more than the Bayesian inductive learning approach (and its implementation in R) to predict the color of the next ball drawn from a box given the outcome of a first observation.

We were clearly outnumbered

Hopefully, by the end of the week, the probability to reach the next lecture room without getting lost given the location of the previous one will be of the same order as the probability of being eaten by mosquitos while wandering by the Kitinen river in July.

To be continued...