Effects of the 12 May 2021 Geomagnetic Storm on Georeferencing Precision

Abstract

In this work, we present the positioning error analysis of the 12 May 2021 moderate geomagnetic storm. The storm happened during spring in the northern hemisphere (fall in the south). We selected 868 GNSS stations around the globe to study the ionospheric and the apparent position variations. We compared the day of the storm with the three previous days. The analysis shows the global impact of the storm. In the quiet days, 93% of the stations had 3D errors less than 10 cm, while during the storm, only 41% kept this level of accuracy. The higher impact was over the Up component. Although the stations have algorithms to correct ionospheric disturbances, the inaccuracies lasted for nine hours. The most severe effects on the positioning errors were noticed in the South American sector. More than 60% of the perturbed stations were located in this region. We also studied the effects produced by two other similar geomagnetic storms that occurred on 27 March 2017 and on 5 August 2019. The comparison of the storms shows that the effects on position inaccuracies are not directly deductible neither from the characteristics of geomagnetic storms nor from enhancement and/or variations of the ionospheric plasma.

Ionospheric Behavior during the 10 June 2021 Annular Solar Eclipse and Its Impact on GNSS Precise Point Positioning

“…The methodology used in the 10 June 2021 annular eclipse is mainly based on the one described in Valdés-Abreu et al [29]. However, in this work we incorporate the processing of ionospheric data from a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite.…”

“…According to the methodology [29], we used the ordinary Kriging interpolation method to produce the TEC maps at each ionospheric pierce point (IPP). With this method, we filled in the spatial gaps of the global ionosphere TEC maps, minimizing the effects of the inhomogeneous distribution of GNSS receivers.…”

“…PPP is used for calculating the coordinates of a single receiver without the need for a reference station nearby as a control station. In addition, we can find some free PPP services available online [29]. PPP-AR is an enhanced version of the PPP technique that resolves the carrier phase ambiguities, improving the PPP accuracy [29][30][31].…”

“…In addition, we can find some free PPP services available online [29]. PPP-AR is an enhanced version of the PPP technique that resolves the carrier phase ambiguities, improving the PPP accuracy [29][30][31]. Katsigianni et al [30] recently presented a comparison between PPP and PPP-AR.…”

“…Thus, we selected the CSRS-PPP service for this work because it is one of the most commonly used PPP online services in the field. We also applied the common noise filter to more than 2300 GNSS stations, to correct the time series of the North, East, and Up components of the GNSS receivers, as described in [29].…”