GPS & the Solar Storm

Monitoring the Solar Storm of October 29-30, 2003

GPS data from the CORS network can be used to provide a detailed model of the ionosphere over the continental United States. The movie shown here is for the time period from Oct 28 to Oct 30 2003, during which enormous solar flares in the sun's corona induced large fluctuations in the earth's ionosphere. These fluctuations are expressed in TEC units for Total Electron Content, a measure of the amount of ionization in the upper regions of the earth's atmosphere.

The movie begins one day before the storm to better illustrate it's intensity. The date and universal time are displayed at the top of the frame. The quiet night time ionosphere is clearly visible each day, however the day time ionospheres on the 2nd and 3rd days is dramatically different from that of the 1st day.

These results were computed using the modeling program known as MAGIC developed under an NGS post-doctoral grant to Paul Spencer, in cooperation with the NOAA Space Environment Center and the joint NOAA/University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Enviromental Sciences (CIRES).

For more information, please contact Gerry Mader.

View the AVI movie of the U.S.

View the AVI movie of the World (12.9MB).

Last updated by NGS.webmaster on April 29, 2004