MONITOR

MONitoring of the Ionosphere by innovative Techniques, coordinated Observations and Resources

The main goal of MONITOR is to design, develop, deploy and operate a system for collection, processing and archiving of ionospheric observation data. The data are collected in order to study the impact of ionospheric effects on the performance of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as GPS and Galileo. Besides potential impact on the future Galileo system the focus is on estimating potential effects on the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS).

Considering the expected increase of the solar activity during the upcoming years, extreme ionospheric perturbations around solar maximum shall be studied on global scale.

Main ionospheric effects under consideration are severe temporal and spatial effects such as extreme horizontal electron density gradients and rapid radio scintillations.

Global Distribution of the Ionospheric Experimental Stations Network (IEN) including contributing stations as those from DLR (red)

Main issues are

• Design MONITOR architecture
• Deployment of an Ionospheric Experimental Stations Network (IEN)
• Establishment of a Central Archiving and Processing Facility
• Development of a Galileo Ionosphereic Scintillation Monitor (GISMO)
• Experimental Campaigns and their analysis

In addition to the IEN data external data sources and services such as SWACI will contribute to the impact studies.

Support: ESA

Consortium:

IEEA/Courbevoie (Prime), DLR/Neustrelitz, Thales Alenia Space (TAS) /Toulouse & Milano, Jena-Optronik (JOP)/Jena, University of Catalonia, (UPC)/Barcelona, QinetiQ/Malvern, Universität Rennes/Rennes, CLS/Toulouse, GMV/Madrid, Finish Meteorological Institute (FMI)/Helsinki, Télécom Bretagne/Brest, ICTP/Trieste

Duration: 2010 -2014