A New Installation for Geomagnetic Field Monitoring at Talos Dome, a Remote Antarctic Site Away from Permanent Observatories

An automatic geomagnetic station for monitoring the Earth’s magnetic field variations
was installed in December 2020 at Talos Dome, a remote site on the Antarctic Plateau, about 300 km
away from the permanent geomagnetic observatory at Mario Zucchelli Station (MZS). Designed and
assembled at the laboratory of electronics of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV)
in Rome, this autonomous station is formed by a vector magnetometer specifically manufactured by
Lviv Institute (Ukraine) for very low temperatures and a low-power system supplied by batteries
charged by a wind generator and solar panel. Data, sampled at 1 Hz, are locally stored and can
be downloaded once a year during the Antarctic summer expeditions. The goal was to integrate
observatory data for better monitoring the geomagnetic field from an uncovered Antarctic area. In
fact, it is well known that the distribution of geomagnetic observatories strongly favors the northern
hemisphere, and each new instrumental installation in Antarctica should be considered as a useful
attempt to balance the geomagnetic monitoring in the two hemispheres. The achieved goal was
to obtain a long data series, keeping the station working even during the austral winter when the
temperature can reach −60 ◦C; we recorded almost 11 months of data in one year and the station is
still operating. Data from the new station, jointly with data from permanent observatories, improve
the analysis of the magnetospheric dynamics and the ionosphere–magnetosphere coupling. Talos
Dome, together with the Italian geomagnetic observatory at Mario Zucchelli Station and New Zealand
geomagnetic observatory at Scott Base, constitutes a network along the 80◦S geomagnetic parallel,
which is interesting for studying the longitudinal propagation of geomagnetic signals of external
origin. In this work we present the characteristics of the station and of the data it provides, with the
aim of them for analysis in the framework of space weather.