James Jones (Northrop Grumman)
Keywords: space weather, SSA, radio burst, automated, solar
Abstract:
Modern technology, specifically radio communications, is particularly vulnerable to various aspects of space weather. The solar environment can disrupt satellite communications links which can have a variety of impacts from loss of data to loss of spacecraft control. Radio spectrograph instruments are used to monitor the suns coronal emissions of plasma that travel with the solar wind towards Earth. These radio bursts are detected by radio observatories around the world, analyzed manually and bulletins are created to notify satellite operators. This paper presents a real-time method to automatically detect and classify radio bursts measured by solar radio spectrographs using mathematical morphology, which is ideal for the identification of shapes or objects embedded in complex backgrounds. Since type III radio bursts typically last only about 1-3 seconds they have a distinctive shape, a vertical line that spans a wide frequency range in a short time period, the object can be detected with a single structuring element. Data from the current solar max were used to validate the method. Results were compared to the manual analysis from the observatories.
Date of Conference: September 9-12, 2014
Track: Atmospherics/Space Weather