Developing Mesospheric and Lower-Thermospheric Capabilities for the Sondrestrom Radar

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A major challenge in exploring the coupling between the mesosphere and thermosphere is to obtain appropriate data. Part of the reason so little is known about this altitude region is the difficulty in making adequate measurements. For example, the ability to use incoherent scatter radar to examine the high-latitude thermosphere and mesosphere and to investigate the coupling between these regions requires sophisticated radar techniques. These techniques include Barker coded pulses, multiple pulses, coded long pulses, high- resolution intermediate pulse lengths, and pulse-to-pulse sampling. Because of system hardware limitations, only primative versions of these techniques have been implemented at the Sondrestrom Radar Facility. This situation is changing: the entire receiver and data-taking systems are currently being upgraded. The upgraded system will create the opportunity for a large number of long-awaited new observations in the mesosphere/lower thermosphere region at very high latitudes. This award will provide for the necessary software development and data analysis to permit these observations and use them to attack the mesosphere/lower thermosphere coupling problem.