Space Weather Effects on Satellite Navigation

Space weather is known to impact the operation of global and regional satellite navigation systems. However, there has been a lack of understanding of the true nature of the impact and effective means to mitigate the impact. This is because the space weather effect on satellite navigation is mainly obtained based on GPS receiver architecture intended for navigation applications, which is not optimized for space weather monitoring. Errors from sources such as receiver hardware and software as well as other environmental effects are convoluted with the space weather effects. As a result, space weather effects are frequently mis-characterized. During strong space weather events, ionospheric plasma structures lead to deep amplitude fading and abrupt carrier phase variations, which interrupt receiver operations and resulting in loss of measurements during the most interesting events.

In this presentation, we will discuss new GNSS data collection systems designed for space weather monitoring, characterization, and mitigation. A global network of these special purpose multi-GNSS data collection systems have been deployed worldwide during the recent years. Analysis of the collected data show that the impact of space weather can be drastically different at high and low latitudes. New receiver processing algorithms has been developed to mitigate the space weather effects by exploiting the unique characteristics of the space weather effects. This presentation will summarize progress and current state of the GNSS data collection systems, receiver architectures designed to capture and preserve space weather signatures, and space weather observations derived from this unique set of data and processing algorithms.