Radio Monitoring

Influence of CMEs on the Ionosphere

Worldwide distributed ionosonds provide daily information about critical frequency of the ionosphere. Space agencies publish up-to-date information about space weather on the Internet:

Graph of space weather conditions on May 2024 showing an extreme geomagnetic storm. Courtesy of the Space Weather Prediction Center.

So why carry out propagation studies when everything is within reach? The question to be investigated here is what changes can be observed in the ionosphere when the Earth is hit by a coronal mass ejection (CME), using the means of amateur radio.

To this, the digital beacon protocol “WSPR” developed by Joe Taylor was used as a “measuring tool”. With the help of the WSPR database “wsprnet.org”, which is accessible via the Internet, the own WSPR transmissions were tracked worldwide. Using a suitable mathematical function, a two-dimensional report density map can be calculated from TX-RX distance and time of the individual WSPR reports. This form of representation makes it possible to recognise significant changes in the time- and distance dependent report density. You may read about the results here.