2025 field season highlights

Picture of aurora captured during a trip to Rabbit Lake, SK to deploy a SMILE ASI

November 1, 2025

As the snow begins to fly in the North, the busy 2025 field season is wrapping up. We deployed a significant number of new instruments, in fact, the most ever in a single year! We focused our effort on deployments to high-latitude sites and other tricky places to service, and getting all remaining SWAN Hyper-Spectral Riometers operational.

• 10 new SMILE all-sky imagers
• 9 new SWAN Hyper-Spectral Riometers
• New UCalgary Resolute Bay observatory (includes new REGO and TREx GNSS)

The SMILE ASIs are systems designed to be an upgrade for the aging THEMIS ASIs, and provide full colour imaging at 3-sec cadence (512x512 pixels). With this field season complete, we have about 50% of the array deployed. We will have another busy field season in 2026 with plans to finish that year with 80%+ deployed.

The data from all these new instruments is already flowing into our archive and publicly available. Summary data can be browsed in the Data Portal, and raw data can be accessed and used for analysis with our Python/IDL/API tooling. We are working on adding the SMILE ASIs to our various data discovery web visualizations, such as Swarm-Aurora and AuroraX.

The sites we visited this year were:

• Athabasca, Alberta
• Churchill, Manitoba
• Iqaluit, Nunuvut
• Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan
• Pinawa, Manitoba
• Poker Flat Research Range, Alaska
• Rabbit Lake, Saskatchewan
• Rankin Inlet, Nunavut
• Resolute Bay, Nunavut
• Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories
• Taloyoak, Nunavut
• Toolik, Alaska
• UCalgary's Kluane Research Station, Yukon
• UCalgary's Rothney Astrophysical Observatory (RAO), Calgary, Alberta

Other sites we have new instrumentation at, but didn't travel ourselves:

• Neumayer Station III, Antarctica (courtesy of DTU)