Kauristie, K. ; Andries, J. ; Beck, P. ; Berdermann, J. ; Berghmans, D. ; Cesaroni, C. ; De Donder, E. ; de Patoul, J. ; Dierckxsens, M. ; Doornbos, E. ; Gibbs, M. ; Hammond, K. ; Haralambous, H. ; Harri, A.-M. ; Henley, E. ; Kriegel, M. ; Laitinen, T. ; Latocha, M. ; Maneva, Y. ; Perrone, L. ; Pica, E. ; Rodriguez, L. ; Romano, V. ; Sabbagh, D. ; Spogli, L. ; Stanislawska, I. ; Tomasik, L. ; Tsisaphungo, M. ; van Dam, K. ; van den Oord, B. ; Vanlommel, P. ; Verhulst, T. ; Wilken, V. ; Zalizovsk, A. ; Österberg, K.

published in Remote Sensing, 13 issue 8, pp. 3685 (2021)

Abstract: This paper presents a review on the PECASUS service, which provides advisories on enhanced space weather activity for civil aviation. The advisories are tailored according to the Standards and Recommended Practises of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Advisories are disseminated in three impact areas: Radiation levels at flight altitudes, GNSS based navigation and positioning, and HF communication. The review, which is based on our experiences, describes empirical models behind PECASUS and lists ground- and space-based sensors providing inputs for the models and for 24/7 manual monitoring activities. As a concrete example of PECASUS performance its products for a post-storm ionospheric F2-layer depression event are analysed in more details. As PECASUS models are particularly tailored to describe F2-layer thinning, they reproduce observations more accurately than the International Reference Ionosphere model (IRI(STORM)), but on the other hand it is recognized that the service performance is much affected by the coverage of its input data. Therefore, more efforts will be directed towards systematic measuring of the availability, timeliness and quality of the data provision in the next steps of the service development.

DOI: 10.3390/rs13183685
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