Space Weather Application Center Ionosphere - new capabilities for GNSS users

Kurzfassung

The Space Weather Application Center Ionosphere (SWACI) is a joint project of two DLR institutes - the Institute of Communications and Navigation (IKN) and the German Remote Data Center (DFD). The SWACI project aims to lay the foundations for a space weather center whose services will be focused primarily on ionospheric issues. The project is essentially supported by the German State Government of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The project shall help professionals in the European region, mainly GNSS users, by providing historical data and expert products/services like nowcast, forecast, and alerts on the ionospheric state as well as related space weather issues. SWACI operates a powerful data processing system working both in real-time and post-processing modes in order to provide actual information to the customers (http://w3swaci.dlr.de). Typical data products include European maps of the Total Electron Content (TEC) and corresponding derivatives such as latitudinal and longitudinal gradients and rate of change, updated every 5 minutes. Space based retrievals include radio occultation data as well as a 3D reconstruction of the topside ionosphere between CHAMP orbit and GPS satellite orbit height. Recently, the service has considerably improved in different aspects, such as the data base (ground- and space-based), the IT infrastructure, the products and the Web-presentation. The data base has been extended both with respect to ground- as well as to space-based measurements. The number of available GNSS stations providing data in streaming mode has increased considerably. In addition to the processing of GNSS data, also beacon measurements from various satellites such as NIMS (former NNSS) satellites and COSMIC are received and analysed. Furthermore, we have started to incorporate actual scintillation measurements from a North-European and a South-European station into the service. Space-based CHAMP data products are extended by including radio occultation measurements onboard GRACE into the SWACI processing system, thus doubling the number of retrieved vertical electron density profiles. The IT infrastructure has been improved by installing a more powerful data processing unit for computing up to 300 GNSS ground stations in the near-real-time streaming mode. In order to better fulfil user requirements, new products such as slab thickness, forecast of TEC and TEC perturbations have been developed. They are currently being evaluated. Potential use of these new products for GNSS customers is reported. The Web-presentation has changed considerably. Whereas the capabilities of the former version were rather restricted, e.g. when considering the availability of historical data, the new portal uses professional solutions of data management including modern forms of data provision. SWACI is connected to SWENET as data provider as well as user of space weather information to forecast the ionospheric state. In favour of further improving the service, in particular for supporting Galileo applications, enhanced data exchange with SWENET is foreseen.