Speaker
Description
TROPOMAG is an institutional project of the Environment Department of the Italian “Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia”, and it aims at investigating the connection between Space Weather, Meteorological Weather and Climate with a multidisciplinary and multi-instrument approach. The potential connection between the Earth’s magnetic field and meteorology has been subject of debate for decades, and the potential connection between the occurrence of geomagnetic storms and variations of the atmospheric pressure has been speculated. In the framework of TROPOMAG, long-term measurements campaigns of atmospheric parameters (temperature and pressure) and GNSS based measurements of Precipitable Water Vapor have been carried out on Mt. Etna, Stromboli, Vulcano and Vesuvio volcanoes. In volcanic areas the atmosphere-ionosphere coupling can be favoured by the uplift of the volcanic particulate, which is often electrically charged and can establish an electromagnetic bridge between the low, neutral atmosphere and the high, charged, ionosphere. Control sites, located outside volcanic areas, have been monitored too.
Atmospheric data variations have been compared with geomagnetic series and Dst index, with the aim of identifying possible correlations both on long time series (2011-2025) and on single geomagnetic storm events. A major difficulty is to distinguish between atmospheric parameters variations driven by seasonal effects and/or peculiarities of the measurements sites and variations possibly driven by solar and geomagnetic activity. The analysis is still ongoing and preliminary results are shown in this contribution.
