The PI of the King Salmon SuperDARN radar, Dr. Tsutomu Nagatsuma of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT/Tokyo) paid a visit in early December to the site of the Kapuskasing radar during a trip to install a set of instruments in northern Ontario as part of the PWING project of Dr. Kazuo Shiokawa-san of the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research (ISEE/Nagoya University). The tour was conducted by Mr. Ghislain Leboeuf who maintains the Kapuskasing radar for the Virginia Tech group. Temperatures were on the chilly side!

The first campaign involving SuperDARN, PWING, and the ERG satellite mission is planned for March 2017.

Pictured from left to right: Mitsu Ozaki (Kanazawa U.), Takumi Dejima (Kanazawa U.), Kohei Iida (Nagoya U.), Ghislain, Hiro Uchino (Kyoto U.), and Tsutomu Nagatsuma (NICT)
Photo credit: Masahito Nose (Kyoto U.)

Senior undergrad and beginning grad students are eligible to participate in an introductory summer school program in space weather hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) located in Boulder, Colorado. Support is available. The term of the school is July 17 - 28, 2017 and the deadline for applications is March 1, 2017.

Feel free to consult with Space@VT faculty about this opportunity and ways to pursue your interest in this topic. Email to Dr. Mike Ruohoniemi at or anyone listed at http://space.vt.edu/people.html

For information about the school and links to the NCAR school website, click 'Read More' below:

Photo: Satellite image of aurora provided by Dr. Mike Wiltberger (NCAR/High Altitude Observatory)

A SuperDARN radar has been built on the grounds of the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO) located on the Svalbard Archipelago far to the north of Scandinavia. First light was announced by the radar group at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) led by new SuperDARN PI Dr. Dag Lorentzen and Dr. Lisa Baddeley. The radar is named for the nearby town of Longyearbyen and started contributing data to the SuperDARN stream on October 19, 2016. The Longyearbyen radar is the fourth to begin operations in the northern polar cap region and the first to be sponsored by Norway.

Congratulations to Dag, Lisa, and their team at UNIS!

Photo credit: Mikko Syrjasuo (UNIS)

Sticking with the idea that new releases of the DaViTpy code (https://github.com/vtsuperdarn/davitpy) would happen semi-annually, a new master branch (or version) of the code has been released. It is hoped that questions about the new release can be answered during an ad-hoc DaViTpy-developers meeting sometime during the Fall AGU conference. Tools on this website that use davitpy code are now using the 0.6 release code. Notes about this release follow.

This is a pre-release version 0.6 of DaViTpy. While we continue to make bugfixes and update the code to interface with external sources, a number of developments have enhanced the codebase and changed its functionality.

Ms. Srimoyee Samaddar successfully sat her PhD Qualifying Exam on Wednesday, November 16 before a committee consisting of three professors. Srimoee is advised by Virginia Tech SuperDARN professors Jo Baker and Mike Ruohoniemi. She joined the SuperDARN group after she earned an M.S. degree from Ohio State University.

Congratulations, Srimoyee!

The Virginia Tech SuperDARN group is pleased to announce that Dr. Bharat Kunduri has joined the group as a postdoctoral fellow. Bharat was a graduate student here at Virginia Tech and defended his dissertation on SuperDARN-related topics in the fall of 2013. He has since worked for industry in California and in his native India. He will conduct research with faculty members Jo Baker and Mike Ruohoniemi using data from the mid-latitude SuperDARN radars and extend work on hemispheric conjugacy that he started as a graduate researcher.

Link to news item announcing Bharat's defense of his PhD thesis:
http://www.superdarn.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=166

Welcome back, Bharat!