Speaker
Description
Observations of interplanetary scintillation (IPS) offer a way to provide global measurements of the inner heliosphere using ground-based systems. LOFAR offers capabilities in this area beyond those of other instruments, visualising the turbulence giving rise to IPS during the passage of a Coronal Mass Ejection and associated with the tail of a comet.
Since March 2025 the LOFAR-UK Rawlings Array has been used full time for measurements as part of the RISER (Radio Investigations for Space Environment Research) project, recording over 100 observations per day IPS, distributed across the inner heliosphere, which are subsequently analysed to produce estimates of velocity and ‘g-level’, a measure of the strength of scintillation, related to density. These analyses are joined with the extant ISEE, Japan, IPS data available in near real time, supplemented by Murchison Widefield Array (MWA, western Australia) observations, thus covering different times and Earth longitudes, to input into tomographic reconstructions to visualise and track conditions throughout the inner heliosphere. Such a high number of observations offers the possibility of increasing the resolution of these tomographic reconstructions for greater accuracy in the visualisation, tracking, and resulting predictions. These reconstructions and predictions are further enhanced through use as input into an Enlil solar wind model variant under test at the Met Office.
