PARI maintains a variety of instruments to monitor our local space environment through many geophysical and radio parameters. By “local space environment,” we mean Earth and how it is affected by the Moon, Sun, Jupiter, cosmic rays and meteors.

The following instruments are currently located on the PARI campus:
•    Seismometer for earthquake monitoring
•    Jupiter / Solar 17-30MHz radio telescope
•    Solar panels, whose output to charge batteries is a monitor of solar intensity
•    Weather stations linked to the PARI web site
•    Webcams to monitor cloud cover
•    Cloud monitor using infrared technology to measure sky temperature variations
•    Lightning detector and maps served live to the web site
•    Cosmic ray monitor with live web page

While the weather stations and lightning detector are primarily to insure instrument safety by warning of hazardous conditions, they are also important in recording environmental information for long term study.  PARI continuously records temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation and cloud cover, and makes this information available for environmental studies.

In addition to its own instruments, PARI also hosts instruments used in conducting research for other organizations.  Clemson University has installed an upper atmospheric wind detector, the Clemson Fabry Perot Spectrometer (FPS).  A new instrument in an array that spans the globe from Alaska to Peru, the Clemson FPS measures high velocity winds and temperatures in the thermosphere.  As part of the National Science Foundation’s EARTHSCOPE project, UNAVCO has installed a highly sensitive GPS sensor on the PARI campus to measure geologic movements in the Earth’s crust.  The instrument is one of five east of the Rocky Mountains and will remain in place for at least 11 years.