Speaker
Description
As part of the Pan-European Consortium for Aviation Space Weather User Services (PECASUS) [1], the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences (CBK PAN) traditionally provides global experimental maps of critical frequency of F2 layer (foF2) depression and foF2 depression alerts, calculated in near real-time using data from ionosonde networks. According to the Agreement between CBK PAN and National Antarctic Scientific Center of Ukraine, the data from ionosondes operating at the Akademik Vernadsky Ukrainian Antarctic station (UAS) were implemented into the CBK PAN services.
Parameters of ionosphere such as critical frequencies and virtual heights of the layers are automatically scaled from ionograms. For these purposes the software based on two artificial neural networks (ANNs) with U-Net architecture to identify O- and X- traces of F2 layer was developed. Training the ANNs was carried out on the manually prepared sets of images from ionograms obtained with two ionosondes at the UAS during 2012–2022. Testing of the developed ANNs was carried out on the data obtained during 2023. The absolute differences between the ANN-derived and manually scaled values foF2 were computed to quantify the model’s accuracy. Approximately 50% of the estimates obtained using ANN differ from the manually scaled values by no more than 0.1 MHz.
The software has been running at the UAS server since July 2024, providing high-quality foF2 estimates, and demonstrating good stability. The scaled foF2 values in JSON format are sent to Google Drive every 15 minutes, a few seconds after the end of the ionosonde sounding session and uses for calculating the global maps of foF2 depressions.
- Kauristie, K., Andries, J., Beck, P., Berdermann, J., Berghmans, D., Cesaroni, C., De Donder, E., de Patoul, J., Dierckxsens, M., Doornbos, E., Gibbs, M., Hammond, K., Haralambous, H., Harri,A.-M., Henley, E., Kriegel, M., Laitinen, T., Latocha, M., Maneva, Y., Perrone, L., Pica, E., Rodriguez, L., Romano, V., Sabbagh, D., Spogli, L., Stanislawska, I., Tomasik, L., Tshisaphungo, M., van Dam, K., van den Oord, B. Vanlommel, P., Verhulst, T., Wilken, V., Zalizovski, A., and K. Österberg, Space Weather Services for Civil Aviation—Challenges and Solutions, Remote Sensing, 13, 18, https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/18/3685, 2021.
