The Impact of the 2024 Mother's Day Storm on Aircraft Surveillance across Europe

Kurzfassung

The Mother's day storm from 10 to 13 May 2024 is one of the most extreme space weather events recorded in recent decades and triggered a strong ionospheric response with various impacts on communication and navigation systems. In this study the impact on the aviation sector, and more specifically air traffic management, is investigated with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data from the OpenSky network. For that purpose, the event is presented with solar radiation and wind observations to describe the space weather conditions. Further, the spatial and temporal variations of the ionospheric response over Europe are analyzed with total electron content (TEC) maps and the performance of positioning via Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is examined with 100 reference stations. These analyses show well-known space weather impacts including TEC perturbations, sudden ionospheric disturbances, signal-loss and degraded GNSS performance. Consequently, these effects are also expected for the GNSS positions transmitted via ADS-B, and the analysis confirms that a higher frequency of such anomalies occurs along flight tracks during the event (increase of up to 2.55 %). These anomalies may manifest as data gaps or as position errors of various types, which in turn could decrease the visibility and awareness of participants in shared air spaces. The correlation between space weather and anomalies in ADS-B, as also shown in preceding studies, is thus further substantiated and motivates for follow-up research that combines application-specific data like ADS-B with commonly used ionospheric observations.