UCalgary’s space weather network has eyes on the sky in Canada’s North

On a warm summer day at the Kluane Lake Research Station in Yukon, on the traditional territory of the Kluane First Nation and the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, a team from the University of Calgary walks through a boggy field to a newly built wooden platform.

The crew from the Faculty of Science is installing and testing a ground-based remote sensor — a metal triangular structure with the instrument at the top — perched on the platform to better observe the near-Earth space environment.

“These units are excellent at measuring the high-energy aurora. They are not a camera. They take a single-point measurement of cosmic radio noise that’s able to penetrate through the Earth's upper atmosphere,” Dr. Emma Spanswick, PhD’09, a scientist who’s a Canada Research Chair in Geospace Dynamics and Space Plasma Physics, says during the August field trip to the UCalgary research station in northern Canada. 

The unit, known as a hyperspectral riometer, is one of 22 high-frequency sensors that have been upgraded and installed across Canada and in Alaska in the past six years as part of the Space Weather Adaptive Network (SWAN).

They have dual-use capability, which means they also support real-time systems for northern defence, natural resource exploration and telecommunications — all areas of strategic importance in the Arctic.

Dr. Susan Skone, PhD, a professor in the Department of Geomatics Engineering and associate vice-president (research) at UCalgary, says the instruments collect data that helps researchers predict the space propagation environment for Canada’s modernized northern defence systems.

“It allows Canada better situational awareness and informed decision making in terms of the security and sovereignty of our Arctic environment,” she explains.

Further, Skone says the team can feed the data into larger-scale space environment models to find vulnerabilities and threats to navigation systems we use in our daily lives.

“People are familiar with GPS,” she says. 

“There are tens of millions of smartphones in Canada. Canadian citizens are depending on this everyday whether we know it or not. 

"The GPS signals are vulnerable to natural and human-made interference, and are affected by exactly what we are resolving using these types of riometer instruments.”

They also support low-Earth orbiting satellite communications systems, such as Starlink.

 “It becomes very critical to Canada’s sovereignty and security, particularly in the North, where we’re highly dependent on these space-based technologies,” says Skone, noting some of the areas have limited infrastructure and harsh conditions.

Skone says the instruments could help Canada plan for the future by monitoring and mitigating risk, predicting what may be needed for critical infrastructure and ultimately providing an assured space domain across Canada’s North.

“All of this has been developed at University of Calgary, building on the shoulders of great researchers from decades ago,” she says. 

“There’s probably 40 years of history. We didn’t arrive at it overnight.”

Skone and Spanswick co-lead Space Defence Technologies Alberta, funded by the Alberta Major Innovation Fund, that builds on Calgary’s leadership to grow the dual-use technology sector in Alberta.

Spanswick, an associate professor with the Department of Physics and Astronomy who first started working on the instruments in 2002 when she was a MSc student, says scientists and engineers work closely together on the project. 

The team has now updated older instrumentation with the next-generation system after travelling as far North as Resolute Bay and Iqaluit, and west to Yukon and Alaska this past summer.

The trips have presented their challenges, ranging from the logistical issues of transporting pallets of equipment to remote northern locations, to a young grizzly bear wandering past the site at Kluane Lake as the team field tested the equipment.

Researchers say the entire system is valuable because it can help monitor risks to North America — with Canada’s Department of National Defence, Natural Resources Canada, the U.S. Navy and NATO all interested in the data and end-to-end capabilities.

“We’re able to tell the government that we own the instruments, we own the data, we’ve developed the model,” says Skone.

“It’s all made here at the University of Calgary, all made in Canada, and we are free to use it for national interests.”