Team

MERINO is an international collaboration on space weather monitoring and science investigation. (1) The Chinese Meridian Chain Project is an array of modern space scienceobservatories along the 120E Meridian in China. It consists of 15 observatories distributed from the northern China down to the South Pole, with observational subsystems ranging from optical atmosphere, radio, geomagnetism, to sounding rockets. As a major project for science and technology infrastructure of China, the Meridian Chain Project provides a comprehensive ground-based space environment monitoring in the Eastern Hemisphere. (2)  Also in this region, Japanese universitities and institutions have been running very dense upper atmospheric networks with a long history, focusing on mid- and low-latitude space sciences. (3) In the Western Hemisphere, a network of ground-based geospace observation system exists. This includes achain of incoherent scatter radar facilities, LIDARs, Fabry-Periot interferometers, SuperDARN system, all sponsored by the US NSF geospace facility program. (4) The coordinated effort is also supported by other members of the community, whose unique contribution is to place the observation and science along this meridian circle into a broader geophysical context.