Tuesday, 16 January 2007: 9:15 AM
Characterization of the Near-Earth Environment to provide an Ionospheric Specification for use in operational impact assessments
210A (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
Space weather impacts on communication and navigation systems have traditionally been assessed with post-event analysis, utilizing either ground-based remote sensing or space-based in-situ measurements. This process is time consuming, as complementary measurements are manually identified, collected, processed, and analyzed. The ability to fuse remote-sensing measurements in real time and disseminate space weather impacts on the near-Earth environment with minimal latency is an important capability that must be achieved. To address this current capability gap, a data processing framework was designed to operate autonomously, continually ingesting, processing, and posting a suite of space weather monitoring products for the end-user in real time. Our 24/7 capability relies on a distributed processing and communication scheme that serves as the backbone for automating the various computational tasks and synchronizing the numerous data processing threads. The coupling of the data is accomplished by an advanced data fusion approach, which feeds assimilative and semi-empirical models and performs time-based propagation of the resultant ionospheric states. These nowcast and forecast states serve as the basis for the suite of space weather user products and military user decision aids. Our presentation will highlight a framework that utilizes distributive, redundant and scalable infrastructure efficiently. We will illustrate how the primary system components are loosely coupled, with failover procedures in place as appropriate. We will underscore our data ingestion and processing capabilities, as well as our additional responsibilities of model integration, real-time data acquisition, product generation, and QA efforts to evaluate the end user products. We will show how this system supports the scientific community by providing data and analysis results necessary for model development and enhancements. We will explain how, through supporting model integration efforts combined with identifying new data sources of interest, this Data Center has evolved from addressing the communication and navigation communities to coupling of tropospheric and ionospheric effects to provide an improved product for the radar community.
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