This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project will investigate the possibility of using spaced Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers to measure overhead ionospheric drifts in the polar cap and auroral zone. Four high sensitivity and high data rate GPS receivers will be placed at the Poker Flat Rocket Range near Fairbanks, Alaska, and operated for one year. This site was selected for the availability of infrastructure and for coordination with observations from the Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar, which will allow testing and validation of the inferred drifts. The primary goal of the project is to investigate different receiver spatial configurations and operating modes. This will allow cross-correlation of small fluctuations in the measured signal between each receiver in order to derive the overhead ionospheric flow vector. The scientific questions that will be addressed are: 1) At what scale sizes and frequencies are ionospheric structuring and irregularities primarily present in the auroral and polar cap ionosphere, 2) how does this structure relate to measurements of GPS phase, amplitude, and total electron content, and 3) to what extent can these data be used in a spaced receiver configuration to derive not only total electron content and scintillations but ionospheric plasma drift vectors. One broader impact of the project is that, if it's successful, it would provide a new method to measure vector ionospheric drifts at high latitudes that is easily deployable and relatively low cost. Ionospheric drifts are a fundamental space weather parameter directly related to magnetospheric convection and to magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling. A second broader impact is that the GPS receiver data obtained during the experiment will be made freely available to the community and the receivers will be left at Poker Flat as a community resource.
