GloTEC Ionosphere Data

KO6BTY and I have been playing with ground and spaced based ionospheric data for the last couple of years. This week, we started looking at the NOAA experimental GloTEC project's data. It's really nice in that it has virtually complete global coverage. Also, it's very up to date. At the time of this writing, it's 16:11 UTC and the most up to date data is from 15:45 UTC.

I've used ChatGPT o3-mini to update our data analysis code for the new, to us, GloTEC format and we're starting to see really interesting results. Below are two videos of maps we've created. The first one is for the maximum height of the F2 layer, also known as hmF2, and important for 20 meter ham radio propagation. The data is from Tuesday evening, 2025/02/12 UTC. The second is of the critical frequency, aka foF2, (the maximum frequency radio signal that will bounce vertically from the F2 layer), for the same time period.

You can see the Equiqtorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA) very clearly in the foF2 video. You can see what I think would be called a plasma bubble between the bands of the EIA in the hmF2 video. We're still learning, so I could be wrong about what can technically be called a plasma bubble in the F2.

Anyay, we're seeing pretty cool stuff!

Videos

hmF2

foF2

Comments

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