EISCAT_3D gets go ahead for construction

The construction of EISCAT_3D, a new international research radar for space weather research, has been given a greenlight and will proceed later in June. EISCAT_3D will be the world’s leading facility of its kind, offering a critically important window to the upper atmosphere and the near-Earth space in the European Arctic. The EISCAT_3D team has been working closely with the EGI-Engage and the ENVRIplus projects to setup and develop the EISCAT_3D user portal. This portal will play a central role in the EISCAT_3D architecture in a number of ways: it will provide services for researchers to discover, access and analyse (visualise, mine, etc.) data generated by the EISCAT_3D facilities. The first version of the EISCAT_3D portal was released in 2016 by the EGI-Engage EISCAT_3D Competence Centre and was tested by the broader EISCAT community. Based on this feedback the Competence Centre is now working on an improved portal version, which will be published in August 2017. The Competence Centre integrates contributions from CNRS (France), University of Barcelona (Spain), CSC (Finland), UMEA (Sweden), the EISCAT Scientific Association and the EGI Foundation. The EISCAT_3D will facility will be distributed across three sites in Northern Scandinavia - in Skibotn, Norway, near Kiruna in Sweden, and near Kaaresuvanto in Finland. Each site will consist of about 10.000 antennas fed by a powerful 5 MW transmitter at Skibotn and a receiver at each of the three sites. The EISCAT_3D project will start in September 2017 with site preparations to begin in summer 2018. The radar is expected to be operational in 2021.