Speaker
Description
Extreme historical events in space weather have highlighted the vulnerability of certain infrastructures, ranging from satellite systems and GNSS to power grids. Among the various affected sectors, aviation is especially sensitive to space weather events. In this context, ionospheric scintillations caused by irregularities in the ionosphere can severely degrade GNSS data in equatorial and high-latitude regions, thereby impacting the performance and usability of space-based communication and navigation signals — which are critical for aviation. It is therefore crucial for users to have access to relevant global maps of scintillation intensity.
Within the framework of the ACFJ (Australia, Canada, France, Japan) Consortium’s provision of advisories for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), France – represented in the SPECTRA consortium (ESSP, CLS and Météo-France) – is responsible for disseminating GNSS advisories. CLS is tasked with monitoring and providing near-real time scintillation maps, using various networks of GNSS geodetic receivers. However, since these receivers are ground based, global coverage is inevitably sparse, particularly over oceanic regions.
In order to mitigate this lack of information, especially over oceans, solutions are currently being explored to enhance the quality and relevance in the dissemination of GNSS advisories. One such approach is GNSS-RO (Radio Occultation), a remote sensing technique that primarily utilizes GNSS signals to study the Earth’s atmospheric parameters – such as temperature, pressure, and humidity - but its measurement results are susceptible to the effects of ionospheric scintillation. By combining GNSS-RO data with observations from ground-based GNSS receivers, we aim to produce more comprehensive scintillation maps, thereby improving the quality of our services. Other complementary approaches may also be considered.
