Canadian Geospace Monitoring

CGSM is funded primarily by the Canadian Space Agency, and consists of networks of imagers, meridian scanning photometers, riometers, magnetometers, digital ionosondes, and High Frequency SuperDARN radars.

The overarching objective of CGSM is to provide synoptic observations of the spatio-temporal evolution of the ionospheric thermodynamics and electrodynamics at auroral and polar latitudes over a large region of Canada.

These processes are connected along the magnetic field to the Earth's ionosphere, where they lead to the aurora, heating, modification of composition, and large-scale plasma motions.

In short, the program is designed to specify particle precipitation (aurora), electric currents, and plasma convection in the ionosphere over a large region of Canada.

This requires networks of ground-based magnetometers, ionosondes, High-Frequency radars, all-sky imagers, meridian scanning photometers, and riometers.

An ambitious plan was settled on, requiring numerous new instruments of various types to be deployed in challenging remote environments.

To accomplish this, the team settled on using Telesat Canada's HSi High Speed Satellite Internet system, in conjunction with an information technology infrastructure (basically a glorified local area network with additional capabilities including UPS, GPS, and attached hard-disk storage).

In addition to facilities that were already in place in 2002 (from the Canadian Space Agency's CANOPUS[3] program, the Natural Resources Canada CANMOS magnetometer array, and the NSERC supported NORSTAR, SuperDARN, and CADI programs), the final array will certainly meet the scientific requirements.

In a recent review of major Canadian space science projects, Liu et al.[4] pointed out that CGSM is a unique facility, owing in part to the above-mentioned fact that the bulk of the northern hemisphere auroral region that can be remote sensed from the ground is over Canadian territory, and in part due to a significant investment in new experimental infrastructure that is being and will be realized during the period 2004-2010.

Schematic of Earth's magnetosphere
Contours of constant magnetic latitude and longitude. Latitude contours correspond to 65, 70, and 75 degrees. The bulk of the northern hemisphere auroral region that can be remote sensed from the ground is over Canada.
CGSM instrument complement after completion of ongoing enhancements to the Canadian ground-based space science instrument network. Note contours of constant magnetic latitude from 60 to 80 degrees, showing the large fraction of the auroral region that is over Canada.