The new station is situated only a few hundred meters away from the existing infrastructure ALOMAR, the Arctic Lidar Observatory for Middle Atmosphere Research, to enable synergies from co-located measurements.
 
ALOMAR was established in 1994 and since then monitoring of the stratospheric ozone layer using LIDAR and UV spectrometers has been an important activity at the site. The costs for this have been partly covered by Klif’s ozone and UV monitoring program. With increased interests in climate change in recent years, instruments to study the atmospheric boundary layer, long-range transport of aerosols in the troposphere as well as cirrus clouds, have been added. This is accomplished by collaboration of several institutions, including NILU, UiO, the University of Valladolid in Spain, and the Andøya Rocketrange, the owner of ALOMAR.

Moreover, fluxes of carbon-dioxide and methane from a pristine mire, a few kilometers away from the observatory, are investigated by a team of researchers from Bioforsk, NILU, and the  Smithsonian Institute.