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'

Following consultations with the organizers of the 2020 Workshop in South Africa (Drs. Michael Kosch and Judy Stephenson) and the SuperDARN PIs, the Chair of the SuperDARN Executive Council, Dr. Kathryn McWilliams, has announced that the SuperDARN Workshop is postponed until next year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
See the conference website for more information.
Conference web site: https://superdarn2019.ukzn.ac.za.

Any enquiries, please contact Judy at .

Photo credit: Conference web site (Drakensberg cathedral peaks with aloes)

Dr. Federica Marcucci of the Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali (IAPS), part of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), has announced that the SuperDARN Dome C North (DCN) radar located at Franco-Italian base Concordia, at Dome C (Antarctica), is now contributing data to the SuperDARN data flow. This radar joins the Dome C East (DCE) radar in making Dome C a dual radar site. The starting date for data availability is January 29, 2019. Federica advises that '..from now on Enrico Simeoli of the Italian National Research Council ICT Dep., will take care of DCE and DCN data distribution and you can consider him as the contact person for every topic regarding data accessibility and availability.'

Congratulations to Federica and her radar team!

The PI for the new HF radar located at Jiamusi, Dr. Jiaojiao Zhang of the National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been working with the SuperDARN Data Distribution Working Group (DDWG) to begin contributing data to the general distribution. The radar site is located in northeastern China (46.8 deg N, 130.5 deg E; 41.8 deg N in AACGM) and first observations were reported by Zhang et al. 2020. Data from the radar will be available from June 25, 2019. The name of the associated hdw.dat file is hdw.dat.jme and the listing name for the radar is "Jiamusi East".
Congratulations to Dr. Zhang and her radar team!
Photo: Side view of the main array of the Jiamusi radar (Photo credit: Jiaojiao Zhang)