BARREL Kiruna campaign update

Hej (Swedish for hi)

The campaign is almost here! Once again this year we'll have daily e-mails and telecoms during the campaign for coordination between us, the Van Allen Probes, and other friends. The list of friends is continually growing. Some of the new missions we're excited to work with are MMS, HiT&MIS (an Auroral Imager from UMass Lowell), and the new and improved FIREBIRD.

A more complete update on the science side of running the campaign can be found on the science blog here. We'll be putting the daily e-mail summaries up on the science blog as well.

Stay tuned for more updates as the team travels to Sweden and starts setting up at ESRANGE! Also follow the campaign on twitter @KeV_balloons. @PlasmaNerd on twitter (Alexa) will also be twitting the campaign from Sweden as well.

Hej då (Swedish for goodbye)

Two new BARREL papers just in time for some summer reading.

Looking for something to read for this summer? Well we have something for you. Within the last month we've had two new BARREL papers published.

Lauren Blum et al published another GRL on the January 18 & 19 2013 relativistic electron events. It's a great new look at EMIC waves and when they may be responsible for relativistic electron precipitation.

The second paper is one that we've been working on for a long time. It's on two event time periods, one on the 3rd and the other on the 6th of January 2014. For each event we had some fantastic conjunctions between the array of BARREL balloons and the two Van Allen Probes. We were able to show that the plasmapsheric hiss, and then the precipitation where the hiss was resonant with radiation belt particles, was coherent across large regions of the plasmasphere.

Okay so perhaps this isn't really the light summer reading that you were hoping for, but we hope you enjoy them any way!

The Nature journal where our paper is published.