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.
