In Rome, at the INGV headquarters, experts meet for international aviation safety through Space Weather systems
Will be held from today 28 March and until 30 March the technical meeting of PECASUS international consortium (www.pecasus.eu) for civil aviation safety at the international level through surveillance activities space weather conditions (Space Weather).
Partners from Finland, Belgium, United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Cyprus, Poland, South Africa have arrived in Rome.
The consortium PECASUS, of which the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) is a partner, is one of four centers of excellence selected by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) capable of providing the surveillance services required by the stringent civil aviation certifications.
The increase in technologies to support air navigation, such as positioning via satellite systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo) and radio and satellite communications, in fact entails a growing risk of exposure to adverse space weather conditions. Furthermore, such adverse conditions may also lead to an increasing risk of radiation exposure for passengers and flight crew as well.
The consortium partners' monitoring infrastructures and their capabilities to build algorithms and physical models ensure that PECASUS produces surveillance services of the conditions of the circumterrestrial space, especially in the event of strong solar storms, supporting the risk assessment by the civil aviation authorities.
INGV, in accordance with ENAC, offers space weather services through the supply of both data produced by its own ionospheric observatories (eWSua, Electronic Space Weather upper atmosphere) and geomagnetic (Geomagnetic Ingv Data Portal) either developing specific surveillance models and products (INGV Space Weather Space meteorology), as per ICAO indications.
In particular, the ionospheric observations edited by INGV are addressed to continuous monitoring of the conditions of the ionosphere useful for establishing the reliability of radio communications in the HF band and satellite navigation and positioning services globally, with particular attention to the Mediterranean area.
Furthermore, INGV carries out systematic measurements of ionospheric scintillation in strategic areas, including the Svalbard Islands (Norway), in South America and in the Mediterranean area. Ionospheric observations are processed in real time and integrated with physical and empirical models to provide ICAO with specific observation and forecast products at different spatial and temporal scales.
In the field of geomagnetism, INGV manages three geomagnetic observatories in Italy located in the north (Castello Tesino, TN) in the center (Duronia, CB) and in the south (Lampedusa, AG), for the continuous recording of variations in the earth's magnetic field. The rapid variations of the field, in fact, can provide important indications on the entity, duration and consistency of the changed conditions of the magnetic activity and the relative consequences on a planetary scale. Possible consequences of these strong variations in the earth's magnetic field can cause effects such as the induction of anomalous electric currents on the ground distribution networks and on the sensors on board satellites.
