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GPS for Weather and Space Weather Forecasting (GWSWF)

A joint GeoSciences and Physical Sciences Action Group

Reports

Objectives of the Action Group

The POLENET and ICESTAR - UAMPY (Upper Atmosphere Monitoring for Polar Year) Communities are cooperating to achieve the following:

  1. Ionospheric imaging over Antarctica (planned by both projects).
  2. Exchange of data and expertise for the application of tomography to other fields of interest for both communities (e.g. 3D water vapour reconstruction).
  3. Exchange of technologies to install and manage remote GPS stations.
  4. Possibility to host instruments in the polar stations represented by the two communities.

Achievements during 2008

During the first six months, the work has been mainly dedicated to the first attempts of exchange data and expertise on ionospheric imaging and mitigation of ionospheric effects on GNSS signals. A feasibility study on the use of Antarctic measurements, run by both geodetic and ionospheric teams, for water vapour reconstruction is currently in progress. Recently available, global tropospheric models for water vapour retrieval were implemented in the analysis of geodetic observations with the purpose of improving the estimation process of zenith total delay with GPS data. Comparisons with old models are being carried out and alternative techniques for water vapour content estimation, such as radiosonde. In particular, common data sets from different techniques and overlapping observations periods have been identified and adopted as test benchmarks on which cross-checking can be performed and integrated water vapour can be computed. Analysis is currently in progress.

In detail, the activities performed during 2008 are:

Paper / Poster Presentations:

Informal meeting:

Action Group representatives from Italy, the UK and Brazil had a meeting during AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco to discuss the activities to carry on in 2009. A workshop is planned for May 2009, to be held in Modena or Bologna (Italy), with the announcement to Action Group participants due in February 2009. This workshop will stimulate international collaborations on the use of GPS for neutral/ionized atmosphere investigations over the Arctic and Antarctic, to coordinate the efforts on data management and treatments and to plan the use of existing infrastructures and facilities to optimize the network.

Arctic / Antarctic Campaign 2008-2009:

Upgrade of some GPS receiver settings in Antarctica for a feasibility study on the possible use of the data acquired by the ionospheric community to reconstruct the water vapour concentration. The new settings have been done on the GPS receivers located at the Italian station, Mario Zucchelli, in Antarctica during the last campaign in November 2008. The idea is to make the data available to the geodetic community inside the WG to be analyzed for water vapor investigations.

Between May and October 2008, the China Research Institute of Radiowave Propagation deployed three GPS ionospheric scintillation / TEC monitors at Yellow River station (Svalbard) in the Arctic. Some observation data have been recorded and the analysis work is being done. Currently, a total of nine GPS receivers for TEC and scintillation monitoring are operating at Svalbard, managed by Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica (Italy), the China Research Institute of Radiowave Propagation, and the Space Research Center, Warsaw, Poland. Investigations on the characteristics of the scintillation and the ionospheric irregularities in the Arctic region, especially the movement of the irregularities, will be studied.

Publications:

GPS Imaging of the Antarctic Ionosphere: A First Attempt, L Alfonsi, Y Ping, C N Mitchell, G De Franceschi, V Romano, P Sarti, M Negusini and A Capra, submitted to the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 2008.

Improving the GNSS Positioning Stochastic Model in the Presence of Ionospheric Scintillation, M Aquino, J F G Monico, A H Dodson, H Marques, G De Franceschi, L Alfonsi, V Romano and M Andreotti, submitted to the Journal of Geodesy, 2008.
The work focuses on the introduction of a novel technique to mitigate the effects of corruption on GNSS signals due to scintillations and is based on the cooperation between the ionospheric and the geodetic communities in the UK, Brazil and Italy.

Probing the High Latitude Ionosphere from Ground-Based Observations: The State of Current Knowledge and Capabilities during IPY (2007-2009), L Alfonsi, A Kavanagh, E Amata, P Cilliers, E Correia, M Freeman, K Kauristie, R Liu, J P Luntama, C N Mitchell and G A Zherebtsov, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 70, 18, December, 2008.
The review also includes information on the international cooperation, in progress and planned, among the different communities handling GPS data at polar latitudes.

Monitoring Ionospheric Scintillations and TEC at the Polish Polar Station on Spitsbergen: Instrumentation and Preliminary Results, A W Wernik, M Pozoga, M Grzesiak, A Rokicki, M Morawski, Acta Geophysica, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 1129-1146, 2008.
Describes in detail the instrumentation used at the Polish Polar Station to monitor scintillation, TEC and ionospheric drifts. Preliminary results are presented.

Working Group Participants

From ICESTAR - UAMPY:

From POLENET:

Participating Countries: