Europeans Trained in Understanding Space Weather
TRANSMIT is made up of a consortium of leading universities, research centres, and industry across Europe and as far afield as Brazil and Canada. This EUR4m initiative is being funded by the European Commission (EC) through a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN). ITNs are part of the FP7 People Programme and aim to improve the career perspectives of researchers who are in the first five years of their research career in both public and private sectors.
At worst, solar outbursts can black out satellite signals altogether. They can also create positioning errors and rapid signal fading. These intermittent problems can impact all GNSS users including mission-critical and high-precision applications for air, rail, and marine transport, and even autonomous machinery in areas such as agriculture.
One of the major threats to our ever-increasing dependence on GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) comes from the sun. Solar-related phenomena and their effect on the Earth's ionosphere, such as ionospheric scintillation, can be very disruptive, with serious consequences.
As we approach the next solar maximum in 2013, when ionospheric effects will be at their greatest, a network of internationally renowned experts, led by the Institute of Engineering Surveying and Space Geodesy (IESSG) at The University of Nottingham, are joining forces to help protect society from the effects of solar-related phenomena on GNSS signals. These experts will be training a new generation of young researchers as well as developing new research programs in the field of ionospheric perturbations and their mitigation.
Testimony to the damaging effects of ionospheric interference were the serious service interruption and degradation caused by the so-called "Halloween storm" event that took place in October/November 2003, when one of the most intense solar flares ever was recorded: companies delayed high-precision land surveying, postponed airborne and marine surveys, cancelled drilling operations, and resorted to backup systems and commercial aircraft were unable to use GNSS-based systems for precision approaches.
Marcio Aquino, coordinator and senior researcher in IESSG, said that Europe lacks robust counter-measures to deal with these ionospheric threats. TRANSMIT will succeed in its aims because of the strong expertise and resources from its exceptional set of partners, encompassing both academic excellence and top-end users including the aerospace and satellite communications sectors, GNSS system designers, service providers, major user operators and receiver manufacturers. The EC investment in projects like this confirms the importance Europe is giving to this new and exciting research area.
The project will place Europe in a position to compete with state-of-the-art technology already being developed in North America.
A number of TRANSMIT fellows, the students selected to participate in the training program, will visit UNB for short periods to learn about the space weather data analysis tools and techniques developed by researchers in the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering and the Department of Physics on the Fredericton campus.
