MAARSY – the new MST radar on Andøya/Norway

[摘要] The Leibniz-Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Kühlungsborn, Germany (IAP)is installing a new powerful VHF radar on the North-Norwegian island Andøya(69.30° N, 16.04° E) in 2009/2010. The new MiddleAtmosphere Alomar Radar System (MAARSY)replaces the existing ALWIN radar which has been operated continuously onAndøya for more than 10 years. The new system is a monostatic radaroperated at 53.5 MHz with an active phased array antenna consistingof 433 Yagi antennas. The 3-element Yagi antennas are arranged in anequilateral triangle grid forming a circular aperture of approximately6300 m². Each individual antenna is connected to its own transceiverwith independent phase control and a scalable output up to 2 kW. Thisarrangement allows very high flexibility of beam forming and beam steeringwith a symmetric radar beam of a minimum half power beam width of3.6°, a maximum directive gain of 33.5 dB and a totaltransmitted peak power of approximately 800 kW. The IF signals of each7 transceivers connected to each 7 antennas arranged in a hexagon arecombined to 61 receiving channels. Selected channels or combinationsof IF signals are sent to a 16-channel data acquisition system with 25 msampling resolution and 16-bit digitization specified which will be upgradedto 64 channels in the final stage. The high flexibility of the new systemallows classical Doppler beam swinging as well as experiments withsimultaneously formed multiple beams and the use of modern interferometricapplications for improved studies of the Arctic atmosphere from thetroposphere up to the lower thermosphere with high spatiotemporal resolution.

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