Abstract
The Earth's ionosphere largely determines space weather effects on radio wave communications, navigation and surveillance systems. Lately there has been an increasing demand for ionospheric nowcast and accurate forecast services by various groups of users, including European industry. The paper reviews research activities in Europe based on the exploitation of real-time ground digisondes for the provision of nowcasting and forecasting ionospheric space weather information and useful products and services to support operational applications. During the last few years, important progress in databasing, modelling and forecasting ionospheric disturbances based on real-time data from ground digisondes was achieved in the frames of COST Action 271 «Effects of the Upper Atmosphere on Terrestrial and Earth-Space Communications». Further developments are expected to be deployed with the new COST Action 724 on «Developing the basis for monitoring, modelling and predicting space weather», as well as through the Space Weather Pilot Project of the European Space Agency and through projects funded by the European Commission programmes.
Highlights
Knowledge of the state of the upper atmosphere is very important in several applications
The space effects on Radio Frequency (RF) communications and satellite positioning and navigation applications are determined by the ionospheric electron density structure and the Total Electron Content (TEC)
In order to determine the quantitative relation between the ionosonde derived TEC (ITEC) parameter and the Total Electron Content a statistical study was recently presented by Belehaki and Kersley (2003) using Incoherent Scatter Radar (ISR) profiles from Malvern site (52.1°N, 2.3°W)
Summary
Knowledge of the state of the upper atmosphere is very important in several applications. To better support the previous result, the foF2 values derived from automatic scaled ionograms from Athens Digisonde are compared with manual validated foF2 values from the corresponding ionograms for a time period of 11 days 2a) as sharp peaks in the automatic scaled foF2 This effect was reported by Gilbert and Smith (1988) in their comparison of ARTIST and manual scaled ionospheric parameters observed at Slough. The accuracy of real-time data, the satisfactory geographic coverage of the European realtime digisondes, and the availability of long term series of historical manual validated data that in some cases cover more than six decades provide the possibility for the development of a system for high quality ionospheric space weather services, for the European Region. While COST724 Action is in its initial phase, COST271 is in progress and major efforts have been reported in the development of a comprehensive database of prompt ionospheric parameters for nowcasting and forecasting purposes and of forecasting algorithms to predict the ionospheric and space plasma effects on communications up to a few days ahead of the present
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