Phys.org October 27, 2021
Plasma in the ionosphere plays a significant role in reflecting and modifying radio waves used for communication and radio navigation systems such as GPS, but the accuracy of these can be affected by ‘space weather’ events such as solar storms. The space weather events dynamically increase the total number of ionospheric electrons; GPS systems cannot correctly model this dynamic enhancement and errors occur in position calculations. An international team of researchers (UK, Norway, Portugal) conducted a controlled radar wave experiment by injecting radio waves into the ionosphere, at slightly different frequencies. By annlyzing the returned signals they found that plasma waves were excited in the ionosphere and non-linear waves were mixed, leading to a wide spectrum of non-linear frequencies in the returned signal. The study displays a new method of remotely monitoring the plasma in the ionosphere and of controlling wave modes in a way which could help GPS make better calculations in the face of extreme space weather…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Spectrograms obtained in full-wave simulations. Credit: Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 6209 (2021)Â