The May issue of Eos space and earth science magazine is focused on a region of Earth’s atmosphere that some scientists say we aren’t looking at quite enough. That region is called geospace, which encompasses the mesosphere and the thermosphere from altitudes of around 45 to 1,000 kilometers [30 to 600 miles].
Could one solution for the data gap be…ham radio?
One group called the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation, or HamSCI, is harnessing access to inexpensive, open-source instrumentation along with their passionate, global community to create usable data sets for researchers.
The group is particularly focused on the ionosphere, the layer of geospace that reflects radio waves, and how it experiences variability that affects the propagation of those signals. This work may not replace the real-time, continuous observations that space missions can provide, but it is already contributing to research. Read more from Kristina Collins and colleagues in an article titled “Ham Radio Forms a Planet-Sized Space Weather Network.”
More about this topic at https://eos.org/agu-news/paying-attention-to-the-ignorosphere.