INSPIRE Track 1: Mahali: Space Weather Monitoring Everywhere

INSPIRE奖的部分资金来自地球科学局大气和地球空间科学部的地球空间设施计划，以及计算机和信息科学与工程局计算机和网络系统司的计算研究基础设施和网络以及技术和系统计划。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稀少，操作成本相对较高。解决这一问题的一个有希望的技术是利用现有的全球定位系统基础设施；更具体地说，是利用由电离层电子密度造成的地面观测到的多频GPS信号的延迟。现代移动设备构成了一个由多核并行计算机组成的庞大网络，这些计算机提供地球空间数据处理和存储所需的计算能力。因此，由于全球范围内都可以连接，即使是在偏远地区，移动设备也是建立全球中继器的极佳候选者，这些中继器将传感器数据馈送到云处理环境中，重建空间环境的结构及其动态变化。该项目将使即使在地球上最偏远的地方也能收集空间气象数据，从而大大改善目前空间气象研究中存在的观测差距。基拉·马哈里在斯瓦希里语中的意思是“无处不在”。地球高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人们很难彻底了解这些现象。在当今网络社会中，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，因为它们可以影响人类的电力、通信和导航系统。最近的研究还表明，海啸和地震扰乱了电离层中的电子密度，甚至气候变化也对电离层电子密度产生了可测量的影响。这个跨学科的项目探索了如何利用移动设备作为密集测量网络的继电器来实现这一点。这一方法将为空间气象监测、科学调查以及可能使用整个电离层作为监测自然灾害和帮助拯救人类生命的传感器创造全新的机会。

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.