SOLAR RADIO OBSERVATIONS by the Royal Observatory of Belgium - HUMAIN Radioastronomy Station

Solar radio emission is observed in a broad frequency range (from several hundred MHz down to a few kHz), which encompasses the processes in the whole solar atmosphere. The particular importance of the radio emission is its unique property of probing both thermal (quiet corona) and non-thermal (radio bursts) physical processes in the coronal plasma.

Since May 2008 in HUMAIN Radioastronomy Station a CALLISTO receiver is monitoring the Sun in the frequency range of 45 – 437 MHz. These observations are also collected in the CALLISTO network archives which provides access to data from majority of the solar spectrographs operated or built by the ETH Zurich institute. Recently, the significant improvement to CALLISTO observations has been added in a form of a new receiver HSRS (HUMAIN Solar Radio Spectrograph) which covers the frequency range of 275 – 1493 MHz. This, digital receiver enables large flexibility in the modes of radio observations and it is linked to the recently refurbished 6m dish antenna. The real time availability and the large frequency range observed (45 – 1493 MHz), makes HUMAIN radio observations unique in Europe. The high frequency/time resolution of newly added observations made Solar Radio Observations from HUMAIN observations even more valuable in the term of the real time space weather purposes and for the further scientific studies.

Since March 2010 the additional feature of automatic radio burst detection has been added to the Solar Radio Observations services provided by Royal Observatory of Belgium. Radio bursts are detected in the real time and given a quality index related to the intensity of the emission. The future upgrades of the Solar Radio Observations at HUMAIN will involve further improvements of the observing frequency range, in both low frequency and high frequency part of the dynamic spectrum.

http://sidc.be/humain/