CEDAR: Thermospheric Dynamics and Temperature Measurements from the Auroral Boundary to the Magnetic Equator

This award uses four instruments distributed along the Eastern seaboard of the Americas to measure winds and temperatures near the altitude of the ionospheric peak density, with a cadence of three minutes or less, every night that sky conditions permit. The nature of radio wave propagation in the ionosphere is critical to modern communication and navigation systems, and the ionosphere is a weak plasma embedded in the much denser neutral thermosphere.

Winds and temperatures in the neutral thermosphere redistribute ionospheric plasma in ways that can alter and disrupt radio wave propagation. This project provides critical data for real-time situational awareness of ionospheric disturbances and irregularities that disrupt radio frequency communications, aviation systems, and high-altitude radiation dosing.

This three-year observational program also provides valuable climatological information to improve modeling of dynamic conditions in this critical atmospheric region. In addition to these scientific and strategic benefits, this project maintains an important international collaboration between atmospheric scientists in the United States and Brazil, strengthening our scientific understanding across regions in the Western Hemisphere.

The team is consisted of an early-career Hispanic PI and women researchers of women. This project includes an outreach public lecture activity. The data products will be open source to the community.

This project uses five Fabry-Perot interferometers located at Easton, Maine, Westford, MA, Santarém, Brazil and Cachoeira Paulista, Brazil to make nightly measurements of winds and temperatures below the F2 ionospheric density peak. These data apply to the southern edge of the auroral oval, northern midlatitude, the magnetic equator, and southern midlatitude.

Instruments at Westford, MA also provide these measurements near the nominal atmospheric turbopause at 97 km altitude. The F2 region wind measurements are generally made with a precision of 1m/s or less, and temperature precisions of 15K in the roughly 1000K environment are typical. This effort extends a climatological database that began in 2012 at the Westford, MA site and in 2021 in Brazil.

In addition to providing climatology of F2 wind and temperature, this project provides real-time values of these parameters at each site (three-minute latency from sample measurement to data availability on the web), for potential use in Space Weather nowcasting and forecasting. Due to the unrivaled acuity of these data, vertical winds relative to nightly average of zero are also provided with accuracies of 1m/s.

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.