STARE: Scandinavian Twin Auroral Radar Experiment

STARE (Scandinavian Twin Auroral Radar Experiment) is a coherent scatter ionospheric radar system, which consists of two radars: one in Hankasalmi, central Finland (62.3047 lat, 26.6494 lon) and another one in Midtsandan, central Norway (63.6667 lat, 10.73 lon). STARE is part of the MIRACLE ground-based network which contains magnetometers, all-sky cameras, and STARE.

STARE data:

• Daily quick-look RTI plots, updated automatically every night
• MIRACLE quick-look plots
• Yearly quicklook charts (maintained by Olaf Amm)
• Sample STARE velocity field
• Analyzed daily HDF files (Limited access)
• Sample QuickTime animations for selected events
• Rules of the road for data access. See also MIRACLE rules of the road.

Help in using data:

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Description of an RTI plot
• Interpreting Doppler velocities/electric fields
• Software to view analyzed files

Other:

• Max-Planck-Institute (Lindau) STARE home page
• List of people for contacting
• Event log for station status check
• Some more technical information

Importance notice (Updated 19 Nov 1998): The hardware problems with Hankasalmi station have now been by and large corrected. Data produced since middle of June 1998 should be free of errors. The only remaining problem is that there is occassionally some interference from a local source. This is usually short-lived and in all beams simultaneously and thus not too difficult to distinguish from real data. One has to be careful if attempting statistical studies however. Data prior to June 16 suffers from some known hardware problems, one of them is that beams 3 and 6 were swapped. This is automatically fixed by the viewer program stare.t now. The Butler matrix also had some physical problems due to aging. All this means that data from November 1997 until June 1998 can be used for many purposes, such as viewing the vector plots, but if doing really detailed studies one should take these glitches into account.