Arctic Station Dirigibile Italia

Ionospheric ObservatioN through Open-source Signal Monitoring, Analysis and Recording Tools (IONO-SMART)

Call year: 2025 Status: active IADC_id: 814

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The polar regions play a critical role in space weather and ionospheric studies, as they are key areas where solar wind particles have direct access to the upper atmosphere where the ionosphere sits. Understanding the solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling is essential for advancing our knowledge of the upper-atmosphere dynamics and for mitigating the impact of space weather on technological systems at ground and spaceborne.
The IONOSMART project (Ionospheric ObservatioN through Open-source Signal Monitoring, Analysis, and Recording Tools) aims to establish an advanced upper-atmosphere monitoring instrument at the Dirigibile Italia station in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. This instrument  will leverage GNSS signal acquisition through a Software Defined Radio (SDR) architecture. While SDR systems have been extensively explored for GNSS studies for years, their adoption for continuous monitoring has been limited due to the vast data volume they generate  and the associated challenges in data storage management and transmission.
The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) has been collaborating for several years with the Navigation Signal Analysis and Simulation (NavSAS) group at Politecnico di Torino (PoliTO) to study electron density irregularities in the ionosphere using SDR-based GNSS receivers [1]. Small-scale ionospheric irregularities can cause diffraction of GNSS radio signals, leading to amplitude and phase fluctuations, known as ionospheric scintillations. These fluctuations can adversely affect the precision and reliability of GNSS systems and related technological applications as documented by a remarkable amount of scientific articles. 
Regarding the Arctic area, in September 2017 a pioneering acquisition campaign coordinated by INGV and PoliTO was conducted for the acquisition of raw radio-frequency signal samples from multiple Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), specifically GPS and Galileo, in Longyearbyen (Svalbard, Norway). The campaign lasted 15 days, focusing on the study and characterization of the impact of strong ionospheric scintillations on positioning errors in GPS and Galileo GNSS systems. Tailored tools were developed and implemented for the automated detection of scintillation events using the captured GNSS signal samples. This activity provided significant insights into the effects of space weather on precise GNSS positioning, particularly on carrier-phase measurements, and helped quantifying the associated estimation errors during geomagnetic disturbances [2], thus delivering to the scientific community records on the impact of severe ionospheric scintillations on GNSS positioning performance under extreme space weather conditions.
By leveraging such experience as well as on the recent INGV-PoliTO collaboration activities, a resilient ionospheric scintillation monitoring station has been designed, based on the Signal Monitoring, Analysis, and Recording Tools (SMART) system developed by PoliTO [3]. This SDR-based configuration is capable of continuously acquiring, monitoring, and analyzing GNSS L1/E1 and L5/E5 signals by collecting high-frequency (10 MHz) in-phase/Quadrature (IQ) samples. Its software modules routinely provide amplitude and phase scintillation indices (S4 and sigma-phi) with a one-minute resolution and automatically isolate and store the raw datasets recorded under disturbed ionospheric conditions for further scientific analysis. The issue of the vast data-volume produced is overcome by this system through automatic routines which analyze the acquired data and remove the raw observations not affected by disturbances along with a graphic user interface tool which allows for remote control of the available space and managing of the storage.
Beyond its cost-effectiveness, flexibility and software customizability compared to commercial scintillation receivers, the system offers the unique ability to replay the hi-fidelity GNSS signal samples recorded along with any effects affecting them at the reception time. This functionality fosters the development of algorithms to mitigate the impacts of ionospheric scintillation on GNSS systems as well as those related to Radio Frequency Interferences (RFI). Indeed, the system is equipped with a software-module for RFIs detection and classification, which is not only of paramount importance for the reliability and validation of the acquired scientific data [4] but can also provide complementary information towards operational space weather services like those INGV supply to the PECASUS consortium for the ICAO [5] and for the SWESNET project of the European Space Agency (https://swe.ssa.esa.int/swesnet-project). 
Finally, the adopted paradigms allow for a fully open-source environment for the monitoring, analyzing, and recording of GNSS signals, which is of great interest not only for the ionospheric community (e.g., in the context of the PITHIA-NRF activities [6]) but also in the frame of international initiative for coordinated investigation of the polar atmosphere (e.g. SCAR Program Planning Group AGATA: https://scar.org/science/research-programmes/agata).
In January 2025 a similar station will become operational at the Antarctic South African SANAE IV station, replacing an earlier version that has already yielded valuable scientific results [7]. The IONO-SMART project at Dirigibile Italia would therefore enable an unique capability of monitoring the upper ionosphere with a bi-polar perspective through such systems, setting up a second node for the monitoring of GNSS signals and ionospheric events in the Arctic area. 
The IONOSMART project will be coordinated by Emanuele Pica (INGV) and Alex Minetto (PoliTO) and supported by institutional funds from both INGV and PoliTO. 
The monitoring station is completely passive, emitting no electromagnetic power into the environment, and will share the existing GNSS antenna of the current “nya0p” ISACCO receiver. Additional system components, such as the radio front-end, the data storage and control servers will be housed along with other INGV equipment of the ongoing PAGINA and ISACCO projects.
This fully automated station will operate continuously and it will be remotely managed thanks to dedicated software tools. The project is planned to span five years, during which the following objectives will be pursued:
1 - Install, configure and initiate the system’s operation.
2 - Demonstrate the system’s capability to function continuously 24/7 as a monitoring station and to provide near-real-time ionospheric scintillation data.
3 - Acquire, store, and analyze high-rate GNSS signal datasets during severe space weather events, leveraging the ongoing period of maximum solar activity [8].
4 - Foster the scientific investigations into how the upper polar atmosphere responds to increased geomagnetic activity.
5 - Develop algorithms and workflows to enable new operational products for Space Weather services.

References:

[1]Linty, N., Dovis, F., and Alfonsi, L. (2018). Software-defined radio technology for GNSS scintillation analysis: bring Antarctica to the lab. GPS Solutions, 22(4), 96.

[2] Linty, N., Minetto, A., Dovis, F., & Spogli, L. (2018). Effects of phase scintillation on the GNSS positioning error during the September 2017 storm at Svalbard. Space Weather, 16(9), 1317-1329.

[3] I. E. Mehr, A. Minetto, F. Dovis, E. Pica, C. Cesaroni and V. Romano, "An Open Architecture for Signal Monitoring and Recording Based on SDR and Docker Containers: A GNSS Use Case," IEEE EUROCON 2023 - 20th International Conference on Smart Technologies, Torino, Italy, 2023, pp. 66-71, doi: 10.1109/EUROCON56442.2023.10199078.

[4] E. Pica, A. Minetto, C. Cesaroni and F. Dovis, "Analysis and Characterization of an Unclassified RFI Affecting Ionospheric Amplitude Scintillation Index Over the Mediterranean Area," in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 16, pp. 8230-8248, 2023, doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2023.3267003.

[5] Kauristie  et  al.,  “Space  weather  services  for  civil  aviation, challenges and solutions,” Remote Sens., vol. 13, no. 18, 2021, Art. no. 3685.

[6] Anna Belehaki et al., Integrating plasmasphere, ionosphere and thermosphere observations and models into a standardised open access research environment: The PITHIA-NRF international project, Advances in Space Research, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2024.11.065

[7] Imam, R., Alfonsi, L., Spogli, L., Cesaroni, C., Ebrahimi Mehr, I., Minetto, A. and Dovis, F. (2024) “Scintillation Climatology from a Software Defined Radio Receiver over Antarctica”, Annals of Geophysics, 67(1), p. PA108. doi: 10.4401/ag-9016.

[8] Spogli, L., Alberti, T., Bagiacchi, P., Cafarella, L., Cesaroni, C., Cianchini, G., Coco, I., Di Mauro, D., Ghidoni, R., Giannattasio, F., Ippolito, A., Marcocci, C., Pezzopane, M., Pica, E., Pignalberi, A., Perrone, L., Romano, V., Sabbagh, D., Scotto, C., . . . Viola, M. (2024). The effects of the May 2024 Mother’s Day superstorm over the Mediterranean sector: from data to public communication. Annals of Geophysics, 67(2), PA218. https://doi.org/10.4401/ag-9117.

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Ionospheric ObservatioN through Open-source Signal Monitoring, Analysis and Recording Tools (IONO-SMART)