When our geomagnetic pages emerged in the 1990's they first were thought of as an internal tool. Quite naturally, however, they also took the role as primary mean of external communication. They still serve this double purpose; we use web interfaces at every stage in the process of producing the final geomagnetic data: monitoring data loggers, calibration, processing, presentation and distribution. What you find here is the public part of it enabling you to watch near real time data, browse old data and access digital data. The last mentioned usually requiring a password.

In line with their origin and purpose our pages are not in a popular form; we suppose our users to be acquainted with basic concepts of geomagnetism, typically being geophysicists, space physicists and engineers. Those who like to know more about geomagnetism may benefit from the web site of World Data centre in Kyoto, Japan, and links therein.

Our pages are exclusively in English in spite of originating at a Norwegian institution. After all, the great majority of users are non-Norwegian, and we refrain from marking cultural identity by a parallel version in the Norwegian.

National borders are artificial delimiters in geophysics, and the Nordic geomagnetic community has a long tradition for working across them. Pursuing this tradition we have launched an initiative to exchange data in near real time. As a result we can present data from Greenland, Denmark and Finland in addition to those from Norway.

July 2010
TLH