SuperDARN PI Dr. Jiaojiao Zhang has passed on the news that two radars are under construction at a site in Inner Mongolia. The build is part of the Meridian Project phase II and follows the inauguration of the first SuperDARN radar in China at a site near Jiamusi (http://vt.superdarn.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=354). This will be a twin radar site. The photo shows the construction of one of the antenna arrays. A total of six radars are planned to be built as a chain across northern China. Jiaojiao has been assisted in this work from the beginning by her colleague Dr. Ailan Lan.

Congratulations to Dr. Zhang and her team at the National Space Science Center (CAS)!

Photo credit: Boyu Huang

Over the course of August and September of 2020 the SuperDARN radar group, with its offices and lab, re-located from a building in the Corporate Research Center on the outskirts of Blacksburg to a location near the heart of campus. This was part of the move of the Center for Space Science and Engineering Research (Space@VT) which counts groups in the ECE and AOE departments. Owing to covid-19 circumstances actual activities in the new areas remain limited with most people accessible by email and Zoom. The new quarters for the SuperDARN group are located on the 3rd floor of Durham Hall. Details of our new mailing address are given in 'Read More'. We look forward to welcoming visitors in our new quarters!

During the 2020 SuperDARN workshop held online the SuperDARN Executive council welcomed a new group from the National Space Science Center (NSSC), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to the collaboration and voted the PI of the Jiamusi radar, Dr. Jiaojiao Zhang, to council membership.

The Jiamusi radar, also known as AgileDARN, features new kinds of digital control electronics and has been providing data to the SuperDARN data flow since mid-2019. The radar increases SuperDARN coverage at mid-latitudes in the east Asian Sector. First results were reported by Zhang et al. (2020), see 'Read More' for bio details.

Congratulations to Dr. Zhang and her team at the NSSC!

The Chair of the SuperDARN Executive Council, Prof. Kathryn McWilliams has announced that the 2020 SuperDARN Workshop, originally planned for South Africa, has been moved to an online format, hosted by the University of Saskatchewan. There will be virtual Working Group meetings (live) and asynchronous conference presentations (view at your leisure) on Vimeo. The workshop will still take place over the first week of June. The workshop in South Africa is now planned for 2021. For more information and to register, go to the workshop website:
https://superdarn.ca/workshop2020

The deadline for registration and video transfer is 28th May 2020!

Email inquiries can be sent to:

As a general update, it's been a few years since the major revisions to our grid- and map-level processing software were complete. These revisions date back to RST 4.0 (as of this writing, RST is at version 4.3.1) with the new files being named grid2 and map2 so that previous files could be maintained for data reproducibility. A number of other data issues were being sorted out and processed, including the expansion of the VT data storage systems, that delayed a mass processing of the new files. However with a break in some activities, grid2 and map2 files have now been generated back to the start of the modern dmap file format on July 1, 2006.

As always, for a listing of what files we have for certain dates please visit our Data Inventory page.

Marina Schmidt of the University of Saskatchewan SuperDARN group has announced the official release of pyDARN. In her words
'pyDARN is a python library used for data visualization of SuperDARN data.
Currently, it can:
- read and write SuperDARN DMap files
- read, write and convert Borealis hdf5 files
- range-time parameter plots
- summary plots
Thank you for all the support and help from the community.'

For directions on how to install and use pyDARN, clock 'Read More'