The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is an international scientific radar network consisting of more than 30 low-power high frequency (HF) radars located throughout the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. SuperDARN originated in the 1980's and has since grown to include countries from the UK, USA, Canada, Japan, China, France, Italy, Norway, Australia, South Africa, etc.

SuperDARN facilitates a wide breadth of both magnetospheric and ionospheric science, particularly in the area of magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, with notable unique results and breakthroughs:

Revolutionised the global mapping of ionospheric convection, with particular highlights being the observation of reverse convection cells during northward IMF, and the understanding of transient ionospheric flows driven by bursty and patchy magnetic reconnection.

Facilitated global measurements of energy flow into and out of the Earth’s magnetosphere via magnetic reconnection. SuperDARN measurements allowed the remote sensing of reconnection rates across the merging regions on both the dayside and nightside of the Earth.

Allowed the direct measurement of ionospheric vorticity, which provides a proxy for the field-aligned currents that couple processes in the magnetosphere and ionosphere.

Revolutionised the measurement and characterisation of small-scale ULF waves that cannot be measured by other ground-based instrumentation.

Allow the measurement and tracking of polar patches – regions of enhanced ionisation in the ionosphere that disrupt radio communications.

Through using the SuperDARN radars as meteor radars it has been possible to build up a global picture of tides in the mesosphere/lower thermosphere region of the atmosphere.

There are over 700 papers in the ISI Web of Science database which contain ‘SuperDARN’ in the title, abstract, or keywords.

Reprinted from SuperDARN at BAS: https://www.bas.ac.uk/project/superdarn/#about

The SuperDARN Data Distribution System is shown in the following figure.