The dopler radars that are excellent weather tools do not publish enough of their data in real time. The FAA radars are not designed for weather.

Small planes that are equiped to fly under 12,000 feet in bad weather carry their own weather radar for a variety of reasons. Even commercial airliners don't have this kind of access. Obtaining point in time NOAA information that can be used to correlate to a GPS location at the point when you power it on is an extremely expensive equipment intensive problem. You are going to have to have a GPS unit that you can turn off completely to reset its knowledge of where it is and all past satellite data.įinding a way to do your experiment inexpensively is a major challenge. The longer a GPS unit stays in the same position, the more accurate the reading becomes because it has more information from more trajectories which means it has more intersections of planes. This means that the GPS unit is designed to integrate the information obtained from all satellites being recieved over time to come up with a positional reading. GPS satellites are not in geosynchronous orbit so their trajectories are constantly changing wrt a stationary receiver. My initial thought would be to obtain a receiver that can be placed in a set location and I would take daily readings and compare it to the storm activity posted on the NOAA website or to more detailed data from an expert at NOAA. The other difficulty investingating this effect is being able to determine where, when, and magnitude of ionospheric disturbances are wrt to the GPS satellites when you take a measurement. Surveyor units are like aircraft units in that they won't assume they are on a uniform sphere because that would be too inaccurate for survey work. This probably means that you are going to have work with somebody like a surveyor who has a very expensive GPS that provides this data and is willing to setup on a benchmark point in bad weather. Unless the GPS unit provides this information, I don't think it will be usable for this purpose. I personally haven't investigated any GPS units made for personal use to know what information they can display on satellite signal strength and number of satellites being received. You really need to read up on this and understand it better before you try to come up with an experiment. Ground units can assume that they are on the earth surface however, the earth surface is not a sphere so this introduces additional inaccuracies. Hints: It takes a minimum of 4 signals for an aircraft GPS unit to determine a position. You first need to understand how the GPS units require signals from multiple satellites to calculate a position. Your question tends to indicate that you need to first researchĢ) Hw the ionospheric storm activities affect signals passing through at different angles.

How to measure in expert gps