Profile

I study the Earth’s ionosphere – the part of the atmosphere that is made up of plasma.  Plasma is a substance made up of charged particles that can acts like both a liquid and and a gas.  The plasma is created when sunlight hits the atmosphere, and most changes we see are caused by the sun.  Some of these changes are easy to see, like those caused by sunrise and sunset.  Others are harder to see.

Even though it may not seem like it, the amount of sunlight we get from year to year changes!  One important pattern that we see in the sun, called the solar cycle, lasts 11 years.  Over these years, the sun changes from being active, sending out a lot of X-rays and creating storms, to being calm.  I’m using radar data from two of the solar cycles to see how the shape of the ionosphere changes.

To do this, I write my own computer programs that use data from a huge network of radars, which cover the North and South poles.  The radars work by bouncing radio waves off the bottom of the ionosphere.  We can use the radio waves that return to the radar to figure out a lot of things about the plasma they traveled through, including how fast it’s moving and how much of it there is!  Here is a picture showing how some of the radio waves will travel, depending on how thick the ionosphere is.

Here are some of the instruments used to study the ionosphere that are built near Longyearbyen, one of the northern-most towns in the world.

A lot of what I do is writing and fixing computer programs.  The data that we measure never has all of the information that we need to see what is going on up in space.  We get a bit more data every day, which is great, but it also means that if you want to look at the new data or look at old data in a new way, you need to create to tools to do it yourself.

Once I get my code working, I get to do the interesting part – making plots and trying to figure out why things look the way they do.  It’s really helpful to look over the plots with other people.  If I can’t figure out what’s going on, another person can usually come up with something that I’ve overlooked.

Another important part of my job is writing.  After all, it doesn’t do any good to figure out something cool and then keep it to yourself.  Or even worse, forget how you did it!  I write everything I do in my research notebooks.  I have 15 of them so far!  I also write journal articles, to share my good ideas with other scientists all over the world.