What is Borealis?
Borealis
Borealis is a radar control system developed and deployed by engineers at SuperDARN Canada. Borealis came from the need to upgrade and update some of the older radar control systems that were running at the older radar sites. Borealis was designed to be able to be added to and improved from the basic installation, making it future proof and flexible.
Borealis is a combined software and hardware system which controls the actions of the radar. The hardware is shown in the first instagram post (right) which shows the Borealis 'rack' with the software defined radios (in rows of four). The Borealis software is open source and can be found on our Github page.
Benefits of Borealis
Borealis has many benefits over the old ROS (Radar Operating System) that was installed previously at our sites.
- We can mitigate long-term downtime: many components at the radar sites were old (~30 years!) and no longer available to purchase, and no more support was available for the operating system.
- New transceiver system: replaces both transmit and receiver systems.
- Software-defined radio: software-defined radios give us capabilities of precise timing, high bandwidth and arbitrary waveform generation.
- Capabilities of the system are vastly increased: development of a new system gave us an opportunity to improve, and this system is a game changer for the SuperDARN community. It incorporates many technological advancements of the last 30 years.
- Improve maintenance and reliability: with this system we remove analog beam-forming hardware and a custom digital synthesis hardware system, both of which are common points of failure. They are replaced with off-the shelf components making for easy replacements. Also, because we do beamforming digitally, we are able to remotely monitor the individual antenna channels which we couldn’t do before.
- Make SuperDARN more accessible: the software was written with users in mind, including making experiments easy to write by users themselves, and making data outputs easy to understand and use (files are written in HDF5)
- Improve data outputs: through accurate timekeeping - clock is GPS-disciplined so we have much more accurate timestamps on the sequences than before. This also includes improved signal to noise ratio by using multiple stages of filtering and decimation, with high (100dB) stopband suppression. We can also increase resolution using radar techniques that this new system is capable of, allowing us to increase our data outputs.
- Increase capabilities for science - including the ability to generate multiple radars’ worth of data from a single radar by running multiple experiments concurrently.
Current Installations
Borealis is currently installed at all 5 of SuperDARN Canada's radars. The first Borealis system was installed at the Saskatoon radar in December 2018, and after experiments and preliminary test was up and running, taking reliable data by April 2019. Soon after, it was installed at Prince George in September. Our engineers made an emergency trip to Clyde River in January 2020 and decided to install Borealis there after a hardware failure rendered Clyde River offline for a long period of time. More recently, and pushed back slightly by the COVID-19 pandemic, Inuvik and Rankin Inlet were upgraded in September 2021.
Future Development
The software-based and upgrade-compatible approach to Borealis means that Borealis can continue improving and allowing novel ways to probe the ionosphere, improving returning data reliability and complexity. Borealis is open source, and as such other radar groups have been interested in having their own Borealis radar control system for their radars.
Currently, the SuperDARN Canada engineers are working towards imaging experiments.
