CARISMA (Canadian Array for Realtime Investigations of Magnetic Activity)
The CARISMA site at Taloyoak
CARISMA (Canadian Array for Realtime Investigations of Magnetic Activity) is the magnetometer element of the CSA Canadian Geospace Monitoring (CGSM) project.
It is the continuation and expansion of an original magnetometer array that was part of the CANOPUS ground based instrumentation array. The data from the array has contributed to the publication of hundreds of scientific papers and helped to establish CARISMA as an essential international resource for magnetospheric physics.
The CARISMA network is an array of magnetometers-devices that are used to measure disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field, caused by activity occurring in a region of space near the Earth, known as the magnetosphere. From these measurements, the nature of the event can be determined, and, by using a distributed array of magnetometers, more information can be calculated about their time and spatial evolution. Expanded by a $1.3M CAD award from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, CARISMA is now one of the foremost ground-based magnetometer arrays for space science in the world. CARISMA data are used for determing how energy and momentum are transferred from the sun to near-Earth space to power space weather. CARISMA data can also be used to monitor damaging geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) driven in electrical power grids, and to aid magnetic surveying.