On the occasion of Earth Day 2017 and the March for Science, a collection of Commentaries has been published on-line in the journals of the American Geophysical Union in recognition of the benefits of research in the Earth and space sciences for humanity. SuperDARN founder Ray Greenwald has contributed an article to Radio Science entitled 'The Importance of International Collaboration in Space Research'. Ray's article can be accessed at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017RS006329/full
A related article by Bill Lotko (Dartmouth College) entitled 'The Unifying Principle of Coordinated Measurements in Geospace Science' appears in Space Weather Quarterly at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017SW001634/epdf
The link to the home page for the collection is
http://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/issue/10.1002/(ISSN)2333-5084.SCISOC1/

The popular 'Flags' map showing the national affiliations of the SuperDARN radar sites has been updated to include Buckland Park (Australia), Hokkaido West (Japan), and Longyearbyen (Norway). The national funding agencies of ten countries now contribute to the operation of the SuperDARN collaboration.

Access the Flags map, fields of view map, and other resources via the 'Maps/Tables/Links' menu item or click http://vt.superdarn.org/tiki-index.php?page=Radar+Overview

Image credit: Muhammad Rafiq (VT)

Dr. Nozomu Nishitani of the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research (ISEE) of Nagoya University hosted a workshop to review the accomplishments of the mid-latitude component of the SuperDARN network. The participants include the PIs of current and future mid-latitude radars and specialists in the research that is enabled by mid-latitude radar observations. Just more than ten years have passed since the first radars specifically purposed as mid-latitude instruments came on the air at NASA Wallops Space Flight Center in Virginia (2005) and at Rikubetsu Observatory in Hokkaido (2006). The workshop was made possible by an award from the ISEE Center for International Collaborative Research (CICR): http://cicr.isee.nagoya-u.ac.jp/index_e.html

Photo credit: Dr. Pasha Ponomarenko (U. Saskatchewan) and Ms. Yoko Tanaka (ISEE)

A SuperDARN radar has been built on the grounds of the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO) located on the Svalbard Archipelago far to the north of Scandinavia. First light was announced by the radar group at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) led by new SuperDARN PI Dr. Dag Lorentzen and Dr. Lisa Baddeley. The radar is named for the nearby town of Longyearbyen and started contributing data to the SuperDARN stream on October 19, 2016. The Longyearbyen radar is the fourth to begin operations in the northern polar cap region and the first to be sponsored by Norway.

Congratulations to Dag, Lisa, and their team at UNIS!

Photo credit: Mikko Syrjasuo (UNIS)

Sticking with the idea that new releases of the DaViTpy code (https://github.com/vtsuperdarn/davitpy) would happen semi-annually, a new master branch (or version) of the code has been released. It is hoped that questions about the new release can be answered during an ad-hoc DaViTpy-developers meeting sometime during the Fall AGU conference. Tools on this website that use davitpy code are now using the 0.6 release code. Notes about this release follow.

This is a pre-release version 0.6 of DaViTpy. While we continue to make bugfixes and update the code to interface with external sources, a number of developments have enhanced the codebase and changed its functionality.

A tool for finding periods and radars with high time resolution radar data collected with THEMIS mode has been developed by Ms. Xueling Shi, graduate student in the VT SuperDARN group. It can be accessed from the link to Data Inventory in the sidebar menu or linked to directly (scroll down one frame) via

http://vt.superdarn.org/tiki-index.php?page=Data+Inventory

The period covered is 2010 - 2015. THEMIS mode features a camping beam which is sampled on every second sounding resulting in time resolution of ~6 sec in this beam direction. The THEMIS tool identifies the camping beam.

Xueling welcomes your interest in these data and stands ready to assist in developing related studies and collaborations. Contact her at