History of EISCAT – Part 5: Operation and development of the system during the first 2 decades

Wannberg, Gudmund

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-13-1-2022

Articles | Volume 13, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-13-1-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

The history of ionospheric radars

https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-13-1-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 1

Review article

|

31 Jan 2022

Review article |

| 31 Jan 2022

History of EISCAT – Part 5: Operation and development of the system during the first 2 decades

Gudmund Wannberg

Download

Final revised paper (published on 31 Jan 2022)
Preprint (discussion started on 30 Sep 2021)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on hgss-2021-16', Michael Rietveld, 15 Oct 2021

General Comments

-----------------------------

This is an interesting and valuable paper on the History of EISCAT, complementing the other papers which describe more the

science politics of building EISCAT. It gives an excellent overview of the technical and operational details of the radar

systems, interspersed with personal comments on the social aspects as well.

The paper is accurate as far as I can tell from my knowledge of the EISCAT systems and their history, but some largely minor

errors, clarifications and details are mentioned below. The paper is very well written, with only a few language/spelling mistakes.

Specific Comments

----------------------------

Line 68: The reference here to "EISCAT Steering Committee, 1974" is presumably the same as "Hagfors et al. 1974" mentioned elsewhere

and listed in the references. This reference should be unified.

Line 159-161: I suggest reversing the order of Finland and Sweden or of the institutes such that the

nationalities are in the same respective order.

Line 194: It should read "Rietveld et al., 1993"

Line 196: As I recall, a site scientist in charge of the facility and two engineers were allocated. This was

later reduced to the scientist and one engineer for economic reasons.

Line 289: Checked by "Statens Strålevern" (Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority), although UiT had responsibilty for this.

Line 375: What is the DDT ? Since the abbreviation is not used elsewhere in the text it should be spelled out in full, Deputy Director Technical ?

It probably should be ADT which is introduced later, or all changed to DDT.

Line 382: 1986 should be 1996

Line 417: Since these reports almost certainly still exist in original format at various sites, I suggest

rewording to "They could be of great historical interest but ..."

Line 509: "46-m" ? Is it not 42-m ?

Line 520-521: I am not sure what is meant by the "harvest season". If it refers to a harvest of scientific publications, I would

say that the earlier 1990s were most productive. The ESR probably produced its harvest of publications in the 2000s.

But around 2002 I would say the task was to look for a strategy for the future of the EISCAT radars, which is indeed another story.

I think this sentence needs further explanation.

Line 549: 3 MW was rarely possible in practice, mainly because of limitations in other parts of the system like the power combiner,

waveguide joints, rotary joints (?) etc. 2 MW was more usual, or even less.

Line 785: For completeness it could also be mentioned that another station also started receiving the VHF transmissions successfully in 2012,

namely the Finnish KAIRA observatory (McKay et al., 2015: "KAIRA: The Kilpisjärvi Atmospheric Imaging Receiver Array—System Overview and First Results"

Derek McKay-Bukowski, Juha Vierinen, Ilkka I. Virtanen, Richard Fallows, Markku Postila, Thomas Ulich,

Olaf Wucknitz, Michiel Brentjens, Nico Ebbendorf, Carl-Fredrik Enell, Marchel Gerbers, Teun Grit,

Peter Gruppen, Antti Kero, Toivo Iinatti, Markku Lehtinen, Henri Meulman, Menno Norden,

Mikko Orispää, Tero Raita, Jan Pieter de Reijer, Lassi Roininen, Arno Schoenmakers,

Klaas Stuurwold, and Esa Turunen, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 53, NO. 3, MARCH 2015)

Line 790: Since the abbreviation SPS is used a few lines down, it should be introduced in brackets here.

Line 935: It could be mentioned that in the late 1990s physically smaller tape formats (DAT and Exabyte) were used

and when internet access was sufficiently fast transfers via the Net became standard.

Line 1083: Should this not read "late 1970s" ?

Line 1103: CP-1 is mentioned here for the first time (and CP-2), but the description of what they are is in the next paragraph.

This should be fixed.

Line 1209: The abbreviation NPT could be introduced here, since it is used in the next paragraph.

Technical comments

------------------------------

Line 93: Comma missing: "Bauer et al., 2012" and similar in many other references.

Line 94: "by where" should be "where"

Line 194: It should read "Rietveld et al., 1993"

Line 340: Spelling of "until"

Line 415: spelling of "review"

Line 516: "demolition" is better than "demolishing"

line 892: Spelling of "Receive"

Line 1346: The reference should be: "55, 4/5, 559-556, 1993"

Line 1358: The reference should be: "55, 4/5, 577-599, 1993."

Line 1370: Spelling of "CORrelator LANguage"

ine 1372: The reference should be "55, 4/5, 543-557, 1993"

The formatting of the authors' initials in the references does not follow the style of HGSS.

The initials of all authors should follow the respective names.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-2021-16-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Gudmund Wannberg, 24 Oct 2021
  
  Mike,
  Thank you for a very constructive and helpful referee report. Apologies for the great number of technical errors - I obviously was in a hurry to get the manuscript off my desk and careless with the proofreading. All are corrected now. The reference list has been brought into line with HGSS standards. I have also included text to address your suggestions re the Tromsø staff complement, KAIRA and tape formats.
  The reference in line 68 should really have been to the du Castel et al. publication, the ”Green Book”, the very first publication outlining the future EISCAT. The correct reference was already in the reference list, but for some reason I mixed it up with the ”Yellow Book” one. Probably because I have a copy of the Yellow Book but not of the Green Book; the latter is probably unobtainable now except for in libraries. Text corrected and right reference put in.
  I will sit on the revised manuscript until we hear from the other referee(s), allowing me to work in any additional changes and corrections before submitting it.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-2021-16-AC1
CC1: 'Comment on hgss-2021-16', Hans Volkert, 19 Oct 2021

Community comment for manuscript submitted to Copernicus journal “History of Geo- and Space Sciences”

History of EISCAT –
Part 5: Operation and development of the system during the first two decades
by Gudmund WANNBERG

General impression:
The apparently solicited manuscript constitutes part 5 in a series of HGSS-articles about the history of EISCAT (European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association). It deals with the first two decades of the operational sites Kiruna-Sodankylä-Tromsø in the northern parts of the Scandinavian countries Sweden, Finland and Norway. The author was site manager in Kiruna from 1981-2008. The broad selection of applied techniques and technical details are interesting and deserve to be documented in an HGSS-article also containing references for more in-depth reading.
The four figures (one map and three photos of equipment) are considered very informative. A few more could be added, perhaps also containing one or two key results obtained from the observations.
However, in its current form the manuscript is lacking a clear distinction between the general relevance of EISCAT-observations for ionospheric research, details about instruments and measuring techniques, and personal reminiscences of the author. As a non-specialist reader concerning ionospheric matters, but with a good background in the atmospheric sciences and their science-historical relevance, I am listing below some points of constructive criticism. The topical editor, I believe, will decide, which of these are to be followed-up by the author during the production of a revised version of his article.
Points of criticism:
1) The introduction should be numbered, provide a broader lead into the article’s purpose and avoid too much of a subjective, personal tone at its beginning. Some general remarks about EISCAT (including the full name of the initiative; as, e.g., presented in Wikipedia under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EISCAT ) and a compact summary of the previous 4 parts of the EISCAT-history in HGSS would provide an important service for all general-interest readers.
2) All personal reminiscences should be collected in the (also numbered) final section. It may be entitled “personal resume” (rather than more arbitrary reflections). If the CV-type author’s information of the appendix is not broadened, the current content of merely two paragraphs should be integrated here. Altogether the fine bracket, opened-up in the Introduction and embracing the selected technical details, would be closed in a meaningful way.
3) The list of references should be checked. The numbering of the previous HGSS-articles appears to be erroneous. Explicit mention of articles (or books?) about the history of magnetospheric and ionospheric research are regarded as helpful for putting the paper in proper perspective (e.g., the HGSS-article on the centennial of IAGA [https://hgss.copernicus.org/articles/10/163/2019 ] with a section 4 on aeronomy). Of course, all additions have to be mentioned in the text.

Hans Volkert
(member of HGSS editorial board)

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-2021-16-CC1
RC2:
'Comment on hgss-2021-16', Philip Erickson, 06 Dec 2021

Wannberg

History of EISCAT –

Part 5: Operation and development of the system during the first two decades

Summary:

This article is part of a multi-article series on the history of the European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association (EISCAT). Wannberg, former EISCAT deputy director, covers the first 20 years of the radar operations (1981 - 2008). It is clearly a solicited article, which probably explains the very personal nature of the recollections. These type of recollections, about the hard but quiet work needed to produce the precisely calibrated incoherent scatter observations on the mainland (Tromso, Sodankyla, Kiruna) forming the foundations of EISCAT science, are important to record for posterity. Several sections cover various aspects of radar development (e.g. signal processing, transmitters, antennas, others) and how EISCAT dealt with them in succession. These provide good insight into the details of a high power large aperture radar system and its development and extension. Some discussion is also provided about EISCAT directorship and organization structure as it related to these operations.

Comments:

The author gives proper credit to the collective that made EISCAT work (far beyond one person). This point cannot be overemphasized.

Others have already commented here on technical errors or particular reference updates, so I will not do so and will stick to document structure.

I found it a bit disjointed in a structural sense to have more personal recollections (e.g. “4. Travel on the Job”, “6. Annual Review meetings and Christmas parties”) mixed in with the technical sections on e.g. antennas. I suggest that such reflections are appropriate, but definitely need to be aggregated into their own section at the end. This means that the structure would be altered to (a) Introduction (b) technical activities (c) organization (d) social activities. I think it would read much better if that happened.

EISCAT’s history is rich with this much time being covered, so I was surprised to find fewer images than I had expected (and figures, etc.). Suggest that the author go back and have at least one illustration in each subsection for balance. Are there any photos for example from Annual Review meetings? I think I have seen some on the walls of EISCAT headquarters in Kiruna, and a copy of one of those would be quite useful even in the personal reflections area.

Similar comments apply to the Organization section - e.g. “EISCAT Newsletter .. I have a copy of No. 3” - so put a partial image of the first page in! Or the computers that ran EROS, CORLAN, UNIPROG, etc.

There are many dates given (and some ordering of the sections has time “going back and forth” so to speak) - it would be quite useful for the non-specialist reader to have a figure showing a timeline of key events in the narrative that is being described, for orientation.

The longer technical sections -e.g. 11. Signal Processing - really need subsections (they are very long).

—— P. J. Erickson (PI, Millstone Hill IS Radar, US)

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-2021-16-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Gudmund Wannberg, 09 Dec 2021
  
  My thanks to the referee for his work and comments. I particularly appreciate his sharing my view of the crucial role of the collective efforts of the entire staff, both technical and administrative, in making EISCAT into arguably the world’s best ISR system.
  Specific comments:
  Structure of the paper-
  The referee would like to see a major reorganization of the manuscript. I can partially understand his arguments. However, my intention in structuring it the way it is was that after the Introduction, as a background to the technical sections, I first wanted to focus on the staff, not only its makeup but also on the distribution of responsibilities between the sites, the working conditions, including the geographical dispersion and the resulting travel, and the social activities. I have discussed this structure with the Topical Editor, who has so far accepted it. I will therefore retain the structure of the manuscript as it is. I have added wording into the Introduction to clarify my reasoning. I have tried to make sure that time runs linearly forward in each Section, but will take another look at this and clarify by some added text if required.
  llustrations-
  The main reason there are not more illustrations in the manuscript is simply that I have been struggling to keep the length down; it is long as it is already. I do agree that a few more would be a nice complement to the text and have added the two suggested by the referee, viz. a scan of the front page of my copy of the Newsletter and a photo from one of the Annual Review meetings. I am now trying to find a photo of the correlator and will include that also if I can get a good one. I have to leave it to the Topical Editor to decide if the length of the paper is still within acceptable limits after that.
  Timeline-
  See above under Structure
  Long sections-
  I admit that sect. 11 in particular is very long. I have now split it into five subsections; this does not lengthen the manuscript by more than a few lines. Have also subdivided Sect. 10 into three subsections, viz. the computer hardware, the software and the data handling.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-2021-16-AC2

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (09 Dec 2021) by Kristian Schlegel

AR by Gudmund Wannberg on behalf of the Authors (16 Dec 2021) Author's response Manuscript

EF by Manal Becker (16 Dec 2021) Author's tracked changes

ED: Publish as is (22 Dec 2021) by Kristian Schlegel

AR by Gudmund Wannberg on behalf of the Authors (27 Dec 2021)

Short summary

EISCAT, the European Incoherent SCATter system, was an advanced research radar system established in northern Scandinavia in the mid-1970s for studies of the aurora and the earth's plasma environment. This paper describes the operation, development, problems and successes of the system during its first 2 decades, as recalled by its former deputy director.