Kiruna Atmospheric and Geophysical Observatory (KAGO)

Northern Scandinavia is located underneath the auroral oval and at the southern edge of the Arctic polar vortex, a unique geographical location for research in the fields of atmospheric- and space plasma physics.

IRF has since it foundation in 1957 a national responsibility to perform long-term monitoring (collect and archive observatory data) in these fields.

It is carried out within the organisational unit Kiruna Atmospheric and Geophysical Observatory (KAGO).The primary objective of KAGO is to provide scientists with long, continuous time series of scientifically valuable data.

In order to reach this objective KAGO is required to make the archived and near real-time data easily available for the scientific community and to the general public.

This is essential for data quality assurance as well as to preserve instrument competence over time.From 1993 until 2019, IRF operated the Auroral Large Imaging System (ALIS) which was an advanced ground-based network of up to eight automated auroral imaging stations.

The primary scientific objective was in the field of auroral physics, but it was soon realised that ALIS could be used in other fields, for example studies of Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSC), meteors and other atmospheric phenomena. ALIS was in 2019 replaced by ALIS_4D, consisting of imagers with higher temporal and spatial resolution.

Due to budgetary constraints, three of the original ALIS stations are not equipped with new optical imagers.This application concerns an enhancement of ALIS_4D with three advanced low-light imagers, two adapted for visible light and the third one adapted for infrared radiation.

The application enables KAGO to be particularly useful for the scientific community with respect to the coming Swedish Mesospheric Airglow/Aerosol Tomography and Spectroscopy (MATS) research satellite and the EISCAT_3D radar research infrastructure and in connection with future in-situ experiments onboard sounding rockets launched from ESRANGE.