A group of American scientists plans to spend $30 million installing facilities at Resolute Bay to help them study the northern lights.

They plan to set up two devices, known as Advanced Modular Incoherent Scatter Radars, this summer, said John Kelly, of the Centre for Geospace at SRI International, a not-for-profit research institute funded by the National Science Foundation.

The devices will improve scientists' ability to predict weather events in space that interfere with satellite communications and power grids, Kelly told CBC News.

"It looks more like a football stadium bleachers," he said. "It's a steel structure that supports panels of electronics, so it's a flat surface that's supported by a bleacher-like structure, and we will tilt one a little bit to the north and we'll tilt the second one a little bit to the south."

That means one will point toward the North Pole and Svalbard Island, while the other will be directed towards Manitoba, Kelly said.

They plan to transport the building material to Resolute Bay, located on the southern tip of Nunavut's Cornwallis Island, this summer on the sealift. They hope to have the devices operating in 2008.

Kelly's team is co-ordinating with the THEMIS project, a joint venture between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, which is trying to determine the origin of the substorms responsible for the patterns and swirls of the aurora borealis.

The THEMIS project comprises a combination of 20 automated observation sites with cameras on the ground in northern Canada and Alaska, and five space probe satellites to be launched in mid-February.