Abstract
This paper presents a review on the PECASUS service, which provides advisories on enhanced space weather activity for civil aviation. The advisories are tailored according to the Standards and Recommended Practices of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Advisories are disseminated in three impact areas: radiation levels at flight altitudes, GNSS-based navigation and positioning, and HF communication. The review, which is based on the experiences of the authors from two years of running pilot ICAO services, describes empirical models behind PECASUS products and lists ground- and space-based sensors, providing inputs for the models and 24/7 manual monitoring activities. As a concrete example of PECASUS performance, its products for a post-storm ionospheric F2-layer depression event are analyzed in more detail. As PECASUS models are particularly tailored to describe F2-layer thinning, they reproduce observations more accurately than the International Reference Ionosphere model (IRI(STORM)), but, on the other hand, it is recognized that the service performance is much affected by the coverage of its input data. Therefore, more efforts will be directed toward systematic measuring of the availability, timeliness and quality of the data provision in the next steps of the service development.
Highlights
The Sun controls the conditions in near-Earth space and in the upper parts of the atmosphere, just as it controls tropospheric weather and, our everyday life
This paper presents a review on the PECASUS service, which provides advisories on enhanced space weather activity for civil aviation
Aviation is in many ways dependent on technology that is prone to space weather storms, causing strong spatio-temporal variations in the geospace environment
Summary
The Sun controls the conditions in near-Earth space and in the upper parts of the atmosphere, just as it controls tropospheric weather and, our everyday life. The advisories provide information on space weather phenomena that can affect HF radio communication, communication via satellite, GNSS-based navigation and surveillance systems, or pose radiation risk to aircraft occupants [5]. Potential space weather impacts on GNSSbased services should be continuously observed with indices that characterize scintillation in the GNSS signal phase and amplitude and with the vertical total electron content (TEC) of the ionosphere. Information on enhanced space weather activity causing potential problems in the above described impact areas is disseminated by advisories with a standardized structure.
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