Borealis: An Advanced Digital Hardware and Software Design for SuperDARN Radar Systems

Abstract

The Borealis radar system is a hardware and software upgrade to the conventional Super Dual Auroral Radar Network radar system, which has been used since the early 1990s. The conventional system has hardware and software that is aging, and many components are no longer supported. Limitations of the conventional system limit radar and data techniques for scientific discovery. Using software defined radios, Borealis has improved the flexibility, capabilities, and security of the radar system. Borealis has improved system monitoring and diagnostics and enables more complex experiments. Borealis provides improvements in spatial and temporal resolution. The system can perform full field-of-view imaging, pulse phase encoding and simultaneous multi-frequency operations. With Borealis, data quality and system reliability has been improved. New radar and signal processing techniques are in development to further improve the capabilities of the system and of the data quality.