As reported on the SWPC website (swpc.noaa.gov) Solar Cycle 25 has begun. Quoting: "The solar minimum between Solar Cycle 24 and 25 - the period when the sun is least active - happened in December 2019, when the 13-month smoothed sunspot number fell to 1.8, according to the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel, co-chaired by NOAA and NASA. We are now in Solar Cycle 25 with peak sunspot activity expected in 2025." The press release by the National Weather Service with more details is available at https://www.weather.gov/news/201509-solar-cycle

Photo: Solar image obtained with Solar Ultraviolet Imager aboard GOES-East on Dec. 15, 2019. This is the sun at its least active. Credit: NOAA

Following the fizzle of the geomagnetic 'Big Event' (G3 storm) forecast for Dec 9-11, 2020 due to the CME observed on Dec 7, Prof. Patricia Reiff at Rice University offered her thoughts on how to identify promising solar conditions to HamSCI mailing list subscribers (https://www.hamsci.org/). Quoting from Pat's email:
>> I wasn’t alarmed enough to send out a special alert to my "spacalrt" system. Why?
Well, for the *really big* events, there is a halo CME, centered and expanding uniformly around the sun, saying the CME is pointed our way AND there is a HUGE amount of "snow" on the LASCO coronagraph, from the energetic particles hitting the detector. When I heard the announcement, I immediately downloaded the coronagraph movie and saw neither of these.<<
Pat has offered specific guidance on how to diagnose these conditions in SOHO coronograph observations - See 'Read More'.
The Rice space weather forecast and information on how to subscribe to the "spacalrt" email list are available at http://mms.rice.edu/mms/forecast.php

Photo credit: SOHO LASCO C2 image from the NASA SOHO website

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

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.