Overview of the 2015 St. Patrick’s day storm and its consequences for RTK and PPP positioning in Norway

Abstract

The 2015 St. Patrick’s day storm was the first storm of solar cycle 24 to reach a level of “Severe” on the NOAA geomagnetic storm scale. The Norwegian Mapping Authority is operating a national real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning network and has in recent years developed software and services and deployed instrumentation to monitor space weather disturbances. Here, we report on our observations during this event. Strong GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) disturbances, measured by the rate-of-TEC index (ROTI), were observed at all latitudes in Norway on March 17th and early on March 18th. Late on the 18th, strong disturbances were only observed in northern parts of Norway. We study the ionospheric disturbances in relation to the auroral electrojet currents, showing that the most intense disturbances of GNSS signals occur on the poleward side of poleward-moving current regions. This indicates a possible connection to ionospheric polar cap plasma patches and/or particle precipitation caused by magnetic reconnection in the magnetosphere tail. We also study the impact of the disturbances on the network RTK and Precise Point Positioning (PPP) techniques. The vertical position errors increase rapidly with increasing ROTI for both techniques, but PPP is more precise than RTK at all disturbance levels.