Clear Skies - Kiruna

Where space meets the sky

Join researchers from the DRIIVE project (Drivers and Impacts of Ionospheric Variability with EISCAT 3D) to help understand how winds in the Earth's upper atmosphere above the high Arctic are affected by space.

In addition to EISCAT (the European Incoherent Scatter Radar), the Arctic is bristling with other radars and cameras, all looking for clues as to how the solar wind influences our upper atmosphere. In order to do this, weather conditions near the ground have to be just right for the cameras to measure the atmosphere at altitudes above 100 km.

How you can help

In order to peer into the edge of space, the skies have to be clear. To help us know when this occurs, an all-sky camera near Kiruna, Sweden, is continually photographing the sky, but looking through many thousands of these images is very time consuming. Can you help? Your classifications will allow us to interpret measurements of upper atmospheric winds and temperatures on the edge of space and you may get to see an aurora!

By using your classifications to determine when observing conditions are perfect, we will know when we can combine observations from all the instrumentation. This will help us understand in detail how the Earth's atmosphere responds to the solar wind, and how that affects our modern technologies such as satellites, radio communication and power grids. We will keep you up to date with our findings through the Talk pages, where we will discuss our research, share latest results and enable you to ask questions and let us know if you see anything curious or unexpected!

Why not AI?

Why are we not using artificial intelligence (AI) to do this? Well, that would certainly be useful but to do this we need to train any AI by providing a set of images that have been classified by the most sophisticated computer we know of - you!