SM003-0007
The Effect of Space Weather on ADS-B Data in Hong Kong Terminal Airspace

Monday, 7 December 2020
Poster
Dabin Xue1,2, Jian Yang2 and Zhizhao Liu3, (1)Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, (2)Southern University of Science and Technology, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Shenzhen, China, (3)Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Hong Kong, China
Abstract:
The rapid growth of air travel in recent years contributes to a shortage of airspace resource. To address this problem, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has mandated all civil aircraft be equipped with an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system to achieve the Communications, Navigation, Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) capability.

Compared to the existing radar surveillance system, ADS-B is the Next-Generation air transportation surveillance system based on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and enables aircraft to receive aircraft’s position, velocity, and other aircraft-specific data from navigation satellites. Consequently, ADS-B has many other advantages, e.g. real-time positions sharing and situational awareness improvement.

GNSS plays a central role in the ADS-B system. However, GNSS satellite signals are very vulnerable to the effect of space weather events. The Earth’s ionosphere disturbances such as scintillation can affect the satellite signals propagation, and thereby degrade aircraft positioning accuracy. Especially at low latitudes, severe scintillations occur more frequently. This has a significant impact on the ADS-B performance and poses a potential threat to the safety of aviation operation. Therefore, analyzing the effect of space weather events on the quality of ADS-B data and the ultimate impact on the performance of ADS-B system is crucially important. In this paper, we will analyze the ADS-B data in Hong Kong terminal airspace and investigate the impact of low-latitude space weather events on Hong Kong’s ADS-B performance, in the perspective of data availability, accuracy and integrity.

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