Total Solar Eclipse to Sweep over Svalbard on March 20, 2015

By: miker on: Thu., Mar. 19, 2015 02:27 PM EDT (10096 Reads)

A total solar eclipse will take place on March 20. The path of totality will pass over Svalbard at 10:10 UT and sweep through the fields of view of multiple SuperDARN radars. Totality will last for 2 min 47 seconds. The accompanying plot shows the path of the eclipse with time stamps (credit: Muhammad Rafiq - VT).

Aurélie Marchaudon of IRAP/CNRS is making the arrangements to schedule SuperDARN radars to run in Discretionary Time (DT) for the period 20 March, 08 - 16 UT. One focus of the run will be to observe AGWs caused by the eclipse.

A previous run in support of eclipse observations was carried out in Japan during the annular eclipse of May 20-21, 2012. See the SuperDARN News item at

http://vt.superdarn.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=86

The results were described by Prof. Ogawa at the SuperDARN 2013 Workshop in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. The Hokkaido radar was run in 'Eclipse-Scan' mode, basically Themis-Scan with 15 km range resolution and beam 0 omitted. Quoting Nishitani-san: 'He found 6 min and 2-3 min vertical oscillations of the ionosphere in association with the approaching of the eclipse region. It was difficult to identify one-to-one relationship, however, because the eclipse region did not cross the Hokkaido radar field of view.' Eclipse effects were clearly made out only in the high-resolution camping beam (Beam 4). Analogous effects in TEC were also observed.

Related reading:

Pitout, F., P.-L. Blelly, D. Alcaydé, High-latitude ionospheric response to the solar eclipse of 1 August 2008: EISCAT observations and TRANSCAR simulation, J. Atmos. Sol. Terr. Phys., 105-106, 336-349, 2013.

Total Solar Eclipse to Sweep over Svalbard on March 20, 2015

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