Installation and configuration of an ionospheric scintillation monitoring station based on GNSS SDR receivers in Brazil

The use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) is nowadays very popular, and the positioning service that they provide is becoming the basis of several applications. Due to their wide coverage, GNSS signals can be used at no cost as probing signals to retrieve parameters to characterize the atmosphere, such as ionospheric scintillation indexes. GNSS receivers coupled to the specific algorithm are indeed a valid alternative to large and expensive ad hoc equipment such as ionosondes. In particular, Software Defined Radio (SDR) receivers are characterized by a higher level of flexibility and configurability when compared to commercial receivers, which fits for the purposes of ionospheric monitoring and enable the study of advanced and innovative algorithms, both for scientific purposes (ionospheric monitoring, space weather), and for technological development (robust GNSS receivers design). A GNSS-based ionosphere monitoring station, including an SDR-based receiver and a professional receiver, was installed in the CRAAM laboratory at Mackenzie Presbyterian University (São Paulo, Brazil) on May 2017. Details of the installation and the new approaches for the storage, processing, and transfer of GNSS data, including raw Intermediate Frequency (IF) samples, are described, along with preliminary results related to ionospheric events captured during the first months of its operation

Seismic waves and acoustic waves: from earthquake to music

INGV is currently the largest European scientific institution dealing with Earth Sciences research and real-time surveillance, early warning, and forecast activities in geophysics and volcanology. The Laboratorio Didattica e Divulgazione Scientifica of INGV organizes every year rich educational and outreach activities with schools of different levels and with general public to convey scientific knowledge and to promote research on science and nature, focusing on volcanic and seismic hazard. The activities encompass a wide variety of formats, such as the opening of our labs to schools for guided visits, contributing to national (e.g., the Italian “Week of the Scientific Culture”, launched by the Ministry of Education and Research) and international (e.g., the European “Night of the Researchers”) events, editing educational videos, creating multimedia tools also available on the Web. Moreover, we contribute to expositions and science festivals organizing exhibitions with experiments, models, and exhibits designed to teaching and learning geophysics. Finally, we offer guided visits to the control rooms run by our Institute, which ensures the round-the-clock volcanic and seismic surveillance of the whole Italian territory. During the Week of the Scientific Culture and the Night of the Researchers we opened our Institute to the general public, in order to show our laboratories, to talk about new researches on Earth Sciences and to explain the volcanic and seismic risk and the related surveillance activities. These initiatives are widely appreciated by the community and we organized special events with the aim to inspire curiosity toward scientific research, and to facilitate the approach of the general public to science and nature. The special event of the 2010 programmes was a scientific-musical format: Seismic waves and acoustic waves, from earthquake to music. The aim of this project was to involve the public in scientific events offering happening where the scientific language is mediate through the language of the music. In this way, scientific phenomenon are brought in using emotion, making easier the understanding of the scientific themes. The format started with short lectures on earthquake and seismic wave propagation to move on the comparison between the seismic waves and the acoustic waves. We used seismograms, acoustic instruments, the voice, and the Earth sounds to explain the relation between earthquake waves and music. The scientific talks were organized to create a trail that, through emotion and curiosity, guides the public to the discovery and comprehension of the scientific phenomenon. The final part of the event was devoted to classical/jazz/blues live concerts performed by groups and ensembles, some of them arranged by INGV researchers. As a general result, thanks to this project we joined science and community, merging the INGV mission with the public expectation. This scientific-musical format represented an experimental outreach project, new, stimulating, and appreciated by the audience that can be used as good practice of scientific divulgation

Analysis of the Regional Ionosphere at Low Latitudes in Support of the Biomass ESA Mission

Biomass is a spaceborn polarimetric P-band (435 MHz) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in a dawn-dusk low Earth orbit. Its principal objective is to measure biomass content and change in all the Earth’s forests. The ionosphere introduces Faraday rotation on every pulse emitted by low-frequency SAR and scintillations when the pulse traverses a region of plasma irregularities, consequently impacting the quality of the imaging. Some of these effects are due to Total Electron Content (TEC) and its gradients along the propagation path. Therefore, an accurate assessment of the ionospheric morphology and dynamics is necessary to properly understand the impact on image quality, especially in the equatorial and tropical regions. To this scope, we have conducted an in-depth investigation of the significant noise budget introduced by the two crests of the Equatorial Ionospheric Anomaly (EIA) over Brazil and South-East Asia. The work is characterized by a novel approach to conceive a SAR-oriented ionospheric assessment, aimed at detecting and identifying spatial and temporal TEC gradients, including scintillation effects and Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances, by means of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) ground-based monitoring stations. The novelty of this approach resides in the customization of the information about the impact of the ionosphere on SAR imaging as derived by local dense networks of ground instruments operating during the passes of Biomass spacecraft. The results identify the EIA crests as the regions hosting the bulk of irregularities potentially causing degradation on SAR imaging. Interesting insights about the local characteristics of low-latitudes ionosphere are also highlighted

Installation and configuration of an ionospheric scintillation monitoring station based on GNSS receivers in Antarctica

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs), such as the US Global Positioning System (GPS), The Russian GLONASS or the European Galileo, are space-based navigation systems. GNSSs enable a generic user located anywhere on the Earth to determine in real time his Position, Velocity and Time (PVT), by means of a Radio Frequency (RF) electro-magnetic signal, the Signal-In-Space (SIS), transmitted by a constellation of satellites orbiting around Earth. Uninterrupted Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) solution is determined by GNSS receivers, which continuously process the SIS from the satellites in view. GNSS receivers are part of the GNSSs ground segment. They are a suboptimal implementation of a maximum likelihood estimator of the SIS propagation time. The PNT solution is indeed based on the computation of the SIS Time Of Arrival (TOA), according to the satellite and receiver local clocks. This is achieved thanks to the presence of a different Pseudo Random Noise (PRN) spreading code in the modulated SIS broadcast by each satellite. In the GNSS receiver, the incoming signal is correlated with a local replica of signal code, obtaining the time difference information. The time difference is then transformed into a range information by multiplying it by the speed of light in the vacuum. However, since the receiver clock is not synchronized with the transmitters clock, this measure suffers of time bias, which is considered as an additional unknown in the navigation solution. Finally, the user position is determined on an Earth centred reference system with a process denoted trilateration, by exploiting the range information computed by the receiver and the information contained in the SIS navigation message, such as satellite ephemeris [Kaplan et al., 2005].Published1-252A. Fisica dell'alta atmosferaN/A or not JC

Smart working nell’Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia: quadro normativo, analisi del contesto lavorativoe organizzativo, obiettivi specifici, proposte organizzative e amministrative

oro Agile o come lo indicheremo di seguito in questo documento lo “Smart Working”, si inserisce in uno scenario di sensibilizzazione e di cambiamento nel settore pubblico e privato con un nuovo approccio manageriale volto a favorire e promuovere flessibilità e autonomia nella scelta degli spazi, degli orari degli strumenti da utilizzare e delle modalità operative, a fronte di una maggiore responsabilizzazione dei risultati: è l’evoluzione digitale l’elemento trainante di questo cambiamento. In conformità con la definizione normativa italiana degli anni 2015-2017, il gruppo di lavoro sullo Smart Working del Comitato Unico di Garanzia (CUG) dell’INGV ha lavorato alla stesura di questo Documento per stimolare e coadiuvare l’Amministrazione nel definire le modalità di attuazione dello Smart Working in un ente di ricerca come l’Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, seguendo le proposte metodologiche della Direttiva della Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (PCM) n. 3/2017.Dall’analisi dell’organizzazione dell’Ente e del suo personale ma soprattutto grazie ad una indagine somministrata a tutti i dipendenti, si vogliono qui definire proposte metodologiche attraverso indicazioni operative per l’attivazione immediata dello Smart Working presso l’INGV.Published1-561VV. AltroN/A or not JC

The ionospheric irregularities climatology over Svalbard from solar cycle 23

The paper presents an unprecedented description of the climatology of ionospheric irregularities over the Arctic derived from the longest Global Navigation Satellite Systems data series ever collected for this specific aim. Two TEC and scintillation receivers are working at Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard, NO), the first of which has been installed in late September 2003. They sample the L1 and L2 signals at 50 Hz from all the GPS satellites in view. The receivers monitor an area of about 600 km radius that includes the auroral and cusp/cap regions in the European longitudinal sector. The length of the data series and the privileged site of observation allow describing the Arctic ionosphere along about two solar cycles, from the descending phase of cycle 23 to almost the end of cycle 24. Our analysis results into a detailed assessment of the long-term behaviour of the ionosphere under solar maximum and solar minimum conditions, including several periods of perturbed ionospheric weather caused by unfavourable helio-geophysical conditions. Since November 2015, a multi-constellation GNSS receiver has been deployed in Ny-Ålesund, providing the opportunity to perform the ionospheric climatology from Galileo signals. The results offer realistic features of the high latitude ionosphere that can substantially contribute to the necessary improvements of forecasting models, providing a broad spectrum of ionospheric reactions to different space weather conditions.Publishedid 92322A. Fisica dell'alta atmosferaJCR Journa

Energy Efficient System for Environment Observation

Environment observations provide a unique source of consistent information about the natural environment and they provide resource managers the information to assess the current state of the environment, weight the requirements of different uses by multiple stakeholders, and manage the natural resources and ecosystemsinasustainablemanner.Mostoftheobservationsarebasedonsatellites, but remote-sensing technologies alone cannot guarantee observations at the spatiotemporal resolution and with the accuracy requested for monitoring and modeling applications targeting, like weather and climate extremes and the complex feedback processes between the natural environment and human activities. Dense networks of standard and in-situ weather related sensors are present in EU and US, but it may happen that their data are not always available in real-time or updated with the required scale for various weather and climate applications. Then, highresolution, (near) real-time on field monitoring systems are needed to satisfy the demand to sample environmental data, both in dense populated regions and in less developedandgettingmorepopulatedregions,whereessentialin-situobservational capabilities can be lacking or deteriorating. The paper would demonstrate the possibility to have energy efficient computing and communication systems that can be employed for environment observation and that can enrich traditional in-situ and remote sensing environmental data, to enable a significant step forward in the environment monitoring of a wide range of weather and climate data. The paper will present an approach going in this direction (computing/communication everywhere withlow-powerconstrains),testedinaharshenvironment,byexploitinglow-power boardstoperformdatapre-processingandreconfigurableantennastosenddataina moreenergeticallyconvenientwayappliedtoarealcaseasitmaybethemonitoring of ionospheric scintillation in Antarctica

Analysis of the Regional Ionosphere at Low Latitudes in Support of the Biomass ESA Mission

Biomass is a spaceborn polarimetric P-band (435 MHz) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in a dawn-dusk low Earth orbit. Its principal objective is to measure biomass content and change in all the Earth's forests. The ionosphere introduces the Faraday rotation on every pulse emitted by low-frequency SAR and scintillations when the pulse traverses a region of plasma irregularities, consequently impacting the quality of the imaging. Some of these effects are due to total electron content (TEC) and its gradients along the propagation path. Therefore, an accurate assessment of the ionospheric morphology and dynamics is necessary to properly understand the impact on image quality, especially in the equatorial and tropical regions. To this scope, we have conducted an in-depth investigation of the significant noise budget introduced by the two crests of the equatorial ionospheric anomaly (EIA) over Brazil and Southeast Asia. This paper is characterized by a novel approach to conceive a SAR-oriented ionospheric assessment, aimed at detecting and identifying spatial and temporal TEC gradients, including scintillation effects and traveling ionospheric disturbances, by means of Global Navigation Satellite Systems ground-based monitoring stations. The novelty of this approach resides in the customization of the information about the impact of the ionosphere on SAR imaging as derived by local dense networks of ground instruments operating during the passes of Biomass spacecraft. The results identify the EIA crests as the regions hosting the bulk of irregularities potentially causing degradation on SAR imaging. Interesting insights about the local characteristics of low-latitudes ionosphere are also highlighted.</p