Vijay Harid, assistant professor of electrical engineering, and a team of researchers, received a National Science Foundation award for his project “Establishing an Iron Resonance Wind-Temperature Lidar at High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) for Active Studies of Polar Aeronomy.”

The project is a collaborative effort with five institutions including CU Denver, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and G&A Technical Software, Inc. The goal of the project is focused on making novel measurements at the HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) facility in Alaska.

The HAARP facility consists of an array of high frequency radio antennas that “beam” radio signals into the upper atmosphere. These signals are typically used by scientists to remotely infer properties of the upper atmosphere, however, the information we get is often incomplete. For this project, we will be utilizing a LIDAR measurement system that will be use to fill in some of the gaps of information from the HAARP transmitter alone. LIDAR can be thought of as a “laser radar” and is use in a variety of applications; for this project we will be using LIDAR to determine the chemical composition of certain regions of the upper atmosphere.

Using the combination of LIDAR and the HAARP transmitter may also help the scientific community study aspects of the upper atmosphere in a manner that has not been possible in the past. If successful, it could open the door to a host of new scientific investigations, experiments, and communication applications.