Speaker
Description
The Solar-Terrestrial Center of Excellence (STCE) plays an essential role in the PECASUS consortium (Partnership of Excellence for Civil Aviation Space weather User Services) providing global space weather services to civil aviation since November 2019. A major task within STCE is to perform 24/7 monitoring of the space weather activity and to generate space weather advisories when specific regulations as defined by ICAO (the International Civil Aviation Organization) are met. Reliable High Frequency communication (HF COM) is critical for trans-Atlantic and polar flights, which depend more on high-frequency communication. Radio communication can be strongly affected by space weather disturbances, especially during strong geomagnetic storms, solar flaring and solar energetic particles radiation events. In this study we attempt to perform a first internal validation of the space weather service to aviation, starting with validation of space weather advisories related to possible problems with radio communications (HF COM). We include a general statistics of the HF COM advisories generated by STCE over the past years of operations and group them per advisory trigger (X-class flares, post-storm depression, auroral absorption and polar cap absorption). Next we compare the intervals of issued advisories with end-user reports about radio communication quality as collected from Iceland radio and Gander radio stations. We present the first results from the HF COM advisories validation study, focusing on specific storms, such as the ones in May and Oct 2024.
