Intelligent Systems for Ionospheric Weather Nowcast at GIRO

Abstract:

Modern operational systems for which the ionosphere is a critical advantage or a major inconvenience demand an increasing accuracy and promptness of the ionospheric weather specification. Real-life ionospheric weather nowcast requires not only low-latency data acquisition from a global ionosphere observatory, but also its fully unattended, ”glass-room” operation. For this specific scenario, choices of the sensor systems applicable to support uninterrupted nowcast remain limited. Most spaceborne platforms require significant time for their measurement data to reach the analysis centers, rendering them ineffective in the backcast regime. Most ionospheric imagers (radars, ionosondes, all-sky cameras, 2D total electron content (TEC) mappers, etc.) require human-in-the-loop to extract actionable information from their raw imagery. Accuracy of the ionospheric specification performed under significant model assumptions such as the spherical symmetry for tomography transformations often comes short to meet the metrics.

The Global Ionosphere Radio Observatory (GIRO) is one of the consistent performers with a strong intelligent data understanding (IDU) component to provide reliable subpeak ionospheric weather nowcast. About 60 ionosondes with installations in 30 countries contribute their near-real-time data to GIRO for ingestion and immediate release of a suite of weather products collectively known as Realistic Ionosphere (RION). Raw ionogram images in GIRO are provided with a record of their automatic interpretation using various “autoscaling” software tools. RION operates a global 3D IRI-based Real-Time Assimilative Model (IRTAM) available every quarter of hour with a 7.5 minute latency from the ionosonde observation start. High-resolution Doppler skymapping of the ionosphere is used to derive warnings of Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (TID) in progress, with significant contribution of IDU to extract signal tracks in their multi-modal mixture with noise. Ray-Tracing through Realistic Ionosphere Explorer (RayTRIX) is operated on a GPU platform to serve the needs of the civil, military, and amateur radio communities. Key GIRO intelligent systems technologies for ionospheric weather nowcast are described and illustrated with examples.