Collaborative Research: RAPID--EclipseMob - Crowdsourcing a Spatial Temporal Study of Low Frequency Propagation Effects Due to a Total Solar Eclipse

University Of Massachusetts Boston, Dorchester MA

Investigators

Abstract

For centuries, total solar eclipses have provided unique opportunities to study the Sun and the Earths atmosphere. They rarely occur across the continental United States. In August of 2017, an eclipse will travel through the heart of the nation and across the entire continent. Eclipses provide a period of relative quiet in the atmosphere as the radiation from the sun is blocked by the moon. This project will take full advantage of crowdsourcing techniques and inexpensive modern technologies to measure the response of the upper atmosphere (the ionosphere) to low frequency radio waves, thus giving new insight into characteristics of the atmosphere that are not well understood. This project is important to national interests as disturbances to the ionosphere are known to modulate radio waves and in some extreme cases, block them entirely. This project also broadens scientific participation through its involvement of students from high school through graduate school and the general public. Additionally, the project is led by an interdisciplinary team of scientists from underrepresented minorities. Transmitters in two locations (Dixon Naval Radio Transmitter Facility in Sacramento, CA and National Institute of Standards and Technology in Fort Collins, CO) will broadcast at low frequencies (LF), probing the D and E regions of the ionosphere. Receivers across the continental US installed and manned by students and the general public will collect the amplitude data at the given frequencies. A subset of these receivers will also collect phase change data. The goal of this project is to use the collected date to examine how the amplitude and phase changes are affected by eclipse path and the relative distance/locations of the transmitter-receiver pairs. The data collected will be processed in collaboration with the LF Radio Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology for ionization and recombination behavior of the D and E layers. The results and the data collected will be publicly available through the EclipseMob web presence.