There will be a strong IEEA contingent at European Space Weather Week 11 next week in Liege, with Pierrick Hamel and Joe Kinrade both travelling to Belgium to present their latest work. Hamel will present a scintillation mapping method using a Kriging algorithm (Session 7, Wednesday 19th November, and splinter session "Working with the SSA-SWE Data Centre - Status and Upcoming Developments"). Kinrade, in his research role within the Marie Curie TRANSMIT training support project, will deliver a review of the current status of GNSS ionospheric tomography in Antarctica (Session 2, Tuesday 18th November).

An extension of the Monitor Project has been notified by ESA to IEEA on 30 june 2014. This extension is planned to last two years and it will support the EGNOS project.

New stations will be deployed, some of them including a bitgrabber, with a main interest in the West African countries and the high latitudes region. Asecna company, based in Dakar will participate to the deployment and to the local support. In addition, The French Space Agency (CNES) Sagaie project with Thales Alenia Space as contractor, will join this project which will become the most important for this activity in the western African sector (from Senegal to Chad and Ethiopia). The network will be made more dense in some places allowing a refined analysis and the derivation of ionosphere structure parameters. Furthermore new collaborations are being set up with the South African Space Agency (SANSA) and a deployment in Namibia and with Boston College.

The project will support EGNOS identifying and analyzing those events potentially leading to a decrease of performances. Scenarios will be built both for the TEC variability and the scintillations. An updated GISM version (see software section) will be developed and made available to industry for system assessment.

The Preliminary Design Review (PDR) meeting (T0 + 2 months) was hosted by Thales Alenia Space in Toulouse on September 23th 2014.

In the frame of the African School on Space Science, which took place last July in Kigali, Rwanda, two presentations were made regarding the Monitor extension program [pdf slides] and the Global Ionosphere Scintillation Model (GISM) [pdf slides].

In collaboration with the Laboratoire d'Electronique et d'Electromagnétisme (L2E) at University Pierre et Marie Curie, IEEA has developped a tool allowing to produce ionosphere scintillation maps for nowcasting and forecasting purposes. This work, based on a Krigging technique, was presented at the Beacon Satellite Symposium in Bath, July 2013 [pdf slides] and has recently been published in Radio Science [DOI]. It was done in the frame of the ESA Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program.