Introduction to Chinese Meridian Project-Phase II

The Chinese Meridian Project is a ground-based space environment monitoring network, which is constructed in two steps. The first step (Phase I) of the project consists of 15 observation stations located roughly along 120°E longitude and 30°N latitude. The second step (Phase II) of the project will additionally deploy 16 stations to better cover China's territory, and build a stereo monitoring capability to monitor the cause and effect of the space weather chain in the solar terrestrial system. Based on the existing two monitoring chains in Phase I, two more chains will be established along 100°E longitude and 40°N latitude, respectively, forming a double-cross network configuration. After the two-step construction, the whole project will run nearly 300 instruments deployed at 31 stations. Aside from standard instruments, quite a few innovative and powerful instruments will be developed, such as radioheliographs with a very wide frequency band, a 3-station incoherent scattering radar to make a 3D measurement of the ionosphere, and a helium lidar to measure atmosphere density up to an altitude of 1000 km.