INSPIRE Track 1: Mahali: Space Weather Monitoring Everywhere

INSPIRE合同的部分资金来自地球科学理事会大气与地球空间科学部的地球空间设施项目，以及计算机与信息科学与工程理事会计算机与网络系统部的计算研究基础设施与网络技术与系统项目。研究人员将对一种使用移动设备形成全球空间天气监测网络的革命性架构进行概念验证演示。目前观测空间天气环境的传感器部署较少，操作成本相对较高。利用现有的全球定位系统（GPS）基础设施是克服这一问题的一种很有前途的技术；更具体地说，在地面观测到的多频GPS信号的延迟是由电离层电子密度引起的。现代移动设备构成了一个庞大的多核并行计算机网络，为地球空间数据处理和存储提供了所需的计算能力。由于在世界范围内，甚至在偏远地区都可以连接，因此移动设备是建立全球中继的绝佳候选者，将传感器数据馈送到重建空间环境结构及其动态变化的云处理环境。该项目将使即使在地球上最偏远的地方也能收集空间天气数据，从而大大改善目前空间天气研究中存在的观测差距。Kila Mahali在斯瓦希里语中的意思是“无处不在”。地球上层大气中的空间天气现象影响着我们的日常生活，但先前的技术限制使得对这些现象的彻底理解变得困难。在当今的网络社会中，监测和预测极端空间天气事件及其对电离层的影响至关重要，因为它们会影响人类的电力、通信和导航系统。最近的研究还表明，海啸和地震会扰乱电离层中的电子密度，甚至气候变化也会对电离层中的电子密度产生可测量的影响。这个跨学科项目探索如何通过利用移动设备作为密集测量网格的继电器来实现这一目标。这种方法将为空间天气监测、科学调查创造全新的机会，并有可能将整个电离层用作监测自然灾害和帮助拯救人类生命的传感器。

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Geospace Facilities Program in the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences in the Directorate for Geoscience, and the Computing Research Infrastructure and Networking and Technology and Systems Programs in the Computer and Network Systems Division in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.The investigators will perform a proof-of-concept demonstration of a revolutionary architecture that uses mobile devices to form a global space weather monitoring network. Current sensors observing the space weather environment are sparsely deployed and relatively costly to operate. A promising technique to overcome this issue leverages existing Global Positioning System (GPS) infrastructure; more specifically, delays in the multi-frequency GPS signals observed at the ground that are caused by ionospheric electron density. Modern mobile devices constitute a vast network of multicore parallel computers that provide the computational power needed for geospace data processing and storage. With connectivity available worldwide, even in remote places, mobile devices are thus excellent candidates to establish global relays that feed sensor data into a cloud processing environment that reconstructs the structure of the space environment, and its dynamic changes. This project will enable space weather data collection even in the most remote places on Earth, resulting in dramatic improvements in observational gaps that exist in space weather research today. Kila Mahali means "everywhere" in the Swahili language. Space weather phenomena in Earth's upper atmosphere influence our daily lives, but prior technical limitations have made a thorough understanding of these phenomena difficult. In today's networked society, it is critical to monitor and predict extreme space weather events and their impacts on the ionosphere, because they can affect human systems for power, communications, and navigation. Recent studies have also demonstrated that tsunamis and earthquakes perturb the density of electrons in the ionosphere, and that even climate change has a measurable impact on ionospheric electron density. This interdisciplinary project explores how to make this possible by leveraging mobile devices as enabling relays for a dense mesh of measurements. This approach will create totally new opportunities for Space Weather monitoring, scientific investigation, and potentially use of the entire ionosphere as a sensor to monitor natural disasters and help save human lives.