Tai-Yin Huang
$49,995
University of Scranton
Pennsylvania
Geosciences (GEO)
The ionosphere is an atmospheric region extends from about 50 to 600 miles above the earth’s surface. This layer of atmosphere has a high concentration of charged particles (ions and electrons) that interact strongly with radio waves. Complex structures and variations of charged particle densities in the ionosphere alter the behavior of radio wave propagation, greatly affect the radio communications and global navigation satellite systems. Understanding ionospheric structures and processes will lead to an increased understanding and prediction of these effects.<br/><br/>The Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) is a collective of professional researchers and licensed amateur radio operators (a.k.a. hams) with the objective to foster collaborations between the amateur and professional communities for the purposes of advancing scientific research and understanding, encouraging the development of new technologies to support this research, and to provide educational opportunities for the amateur radio community and the general public. To maximize the potential of the ham radio-professional researcher relationship, meetings are needed to bring these groups together to learn about each other’s communities, vocabularies, share ideas, and participate in activities that advance both the scientific field and the radio hobby.<br/><br/>This project will support a 2-day HamSCI workshop to address this need. The 2022 HamSCI Workshop will be the fifth annual U.S. HamSCI Workshop since the inaugural meeting at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2018. This workshop series has led to cutting-edge work in the fields of space physics, citizen science, and the use of crowd-sourced ionospheric data. The 2022 HamSCI Workshop theme will be “The Weather Connection,” and will feature prominent leaders in space weather, atmospheric weather, and the connection between them.<br/><br/>Additionally, the 2022 workshop will continue to make headway on topics of past HamSCI meetings, including the use of amateur radio techniques for observing and understanding the physics behind traveling ionospheric disturbances, Sporadic E, the ionospheric response to solar flares and geomagnetic storms, and space weather effects on radio wave propagation. This meeting will also serve as a bi-annual development meeting of the HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station (PSWS), a project funded through the NSF Aeronomy Distributed Array of Small Instruments (DASI) program. Development of the PSWS will lead to a vast improvement of the scientific quality of citizen science observations currently made by the amateur radio community.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.