PI Dag Lorentzen has reported an unfortunate incident at the site of the Longyearbyen SuperDARN radar. In his words: 'All masts in both the main and interferometer array broke down due to high winds and ice loading. Although the antenna arrays have withstood two Svalbard winters, the current combined icing and wind conditions were enough to break the masts, most likely due to the heavy load of the fence and guy wires. The shipping container with the radar electronics is undamaged. With winter approaching we will unfortunately not be able to make any repairs, so the radar will most likely be out of commission for about 1 year.'

It was noted that the radar had been producing excellent data. The entire SuperDARN community hopes for a speedy recovery.

On behalf of the Data Analysis Working Group chaired by Pasha Ponomarenko, Evan Thomas has announced a new release of the Radar Software Toolkit (RST). The new version is labelled RST 4.2 and includes a number of new features (see 'Read More'). Archives of RST 4.2 may be downloaded using these links:
https://github.com/SuperDARN/rst/archive/v4.2.zip
https://github.com/SuperDARN/rst/archive/v4.2.tar.gz
A citable DOI is again available for this version of the software (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1403226) and updated documentation is available at the link below:
https://superdarn.github.io/rst/
Many thanks to those who contributed to this new release: P. V. Ponomarenko (our WG chair), D. D. Billett, E. C. Bland, A. G. Burrell, K. Kotyk, A. S. Reimer, M. Schmidt, S. G. Shepherd, K. T. Sterne, and M.-T. Walach

As announced by Mark Lester at the 2018 SuperDARN Workshop in Banyuls-sur-mere (France) SuperDARN PI Professor Jim Wild will give the 2018 Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) James Dungey Lecture. The presentation will be made at the Ordinary Meeting scheduled for December 14 at the Geological Society, Burlington House, London. Jim took his doctorate at Leicester University and is now Professor of Space Physics at Lancaster University’s Department of Physics. The RAS citation can be found at

https://www.ras.org.uk/images/stories/awards/winners/2018/James%20Dungey%20Lecturer%20-%20Jim%20Wild.pdf

Congratulations to Jim on this high honour!

Yoshi Miyoshi (ISEE/Nagoya University) and Iku Shinohara (ISAS/JAXA) have announced the availability of Level-2 CDF files of Arase (ERG) data. Arase (ERG) is a mission to elucidate acceleration and loss mechanisms of relativistic electrons in the radiation belts during geospace storms. Collaborations with SuperDARN researchers are encouraged.

The particle, plasma, plasma waves, and electromagnetic fields in the inner magnetosphere are measured by the onboard instruments of Arase. The Level-2 CDF files of all eight instruments and the SPEDAS Plug-in modules to handle these CDF files are available at the ERG Science Center.

For a complete listing of links and a message from the ERG project team, click 'Read More'

Dr. Aurélie Marchaudon has announced that the “Planets, Environments and Space Plasmas” (PEPS) team of the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) of Toulouse (National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS and University Toulouse 3 - Paul Sabatier, UT3) will host the SuperDARN Workshop 2018 at the Oceanological Observatory of Banyuls-sur-Mer (Occitanie, France) from the 3rd to the 8th of June 2018. The website is open for late registration until May 27. Workshop website: https://superdarn2018.sciencesconf.org/?forward-action=index&forward-controller=index&lang=en

A first version of the programme is online at: https://superdarn2018.sciencesconf.org/program/details

A new version of the radar software toolkit (RST) has been released by the Data Analysis Working Group and can be found on the working group's github repository as version 4.1. Some major changes come with this new version including the deprecation of the '-new' flag in favor of using '-old' for data formats prior to 20060701 (*.dat, *.fit, etc.). The '-new' flag will no longer work and may break processing if used, so please update any external processing code.

In addition, RST 4.1 comes with major revisions to the gridding and mapping software. This means RST 4.1 will no longer produce the grdex and mapex files that are found on the VT-SuperDARN website. New files produced with the RST 4.1 code will be called grid2 and map2. These new files retain much of the same format as grdex and mapex files but are being separated to distinguish between the major revisions in the gridding and mapping software. RST 4.1 does maintain backwards compatibility so grdex and mapex files should be read and plotted with the current code.

Lastly, RST 4.1 introduces fitacf 3.0 as an experimental option of processing rawacf files into fitacf files. The default for this processing remains with fitacf 2.5, but users have the option to process what we at Virginia Tech are calling fitacf3 files with the command 'make_fit -fitacf-version 3.0'.

For now, grdex and mapex files will be produced to the end of 2017. Grid2 and map2 files will be produced starting with the beginning of 2017, but could be extended further back in time as necessary. Also, starting with the beginning of Dec. 2017, fitacf3 files will be produced in addition to fitacf (v2.5) files. Some of the web tools found on this website have been updated to plot this data. For the latest on what is available in the VT database, please refer to the data inventory page.