Space Weather Impact on Satellite Navigation Services

Abstract

Space Weather events (e.g. Solar Flares, Solar Radio Bursts or Solar Storms) and/or special regional ionospheric conditions (e.g. at Polar or Equatorial latitudes) can have severe impact on the precision of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based navigation services needed in aviation, maritime shipping or upcoming future applications like automated car navigation. Strong ionospheric perturbations, usually characterized by severe gradients and/or rapid changes of the electron density integrated along the used satellite-receiver links, can seriously degrade the performance of GNSS. We demonstrate the impact of space weather on GNSS using data from events of the past solar cycle highlighting the importance for the development of methods to measure, evaluate and predict physical as well as technical quantities, which allow a classification of the space weather impact in different GNSS user domains. We present existing quantities used to support GNSS applications and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we present the pre-operational IMPC (Ionosphere Monitoring and Prediction Center), which provides various services and products for monitoring and predicting the state of the ionosphere in near real time and can thus support a wide variety of GNSS applications used by scientific, industrial and governmental institutions.