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

Abstract

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.