Incoherent Scatter Radar (ISR) is a powerful tool for studying the ionosphere, the part of Earth’s upper atmosphere that is filled with charged particles. ISR measures radio wave signals that bounce off naturally occurring waves in the plasma, including ion acoustic waves and Langmuir waves (also called plasma lines). Langmuir waves are especially valuable because they provide more precise information about electron density than ion acoustic waves.

At Haystack Observatory, the Millstone Hill ISR system includes both a steerable and a fixed vertical radar. While these radars have long been used to study the ionosphere, there has not been a fully automated way to extract detailed electron properties from Langmuir wave signals.

In this study, we developed a new automated analysis pipeline. This method uses pre-processing, deconvolution, and fitting algorithms to extract reliable measurements of electron density and electron temperature between about 150 km and 600 km above Earth’s surface. The framework also provides confidence intervals for the measurements.

This new method will allow Haystack’s ISR to more accurately measure nighttime plasma properties and can potentially be applied to other ISR facilities worldwide.