| | Category | PH | P26 | Geomagnetic Effects on the Wide Area Augmentation System |
| | Abstract | Geomagnetic storms occur frequently through the solar maximum, which |
| | happens to be in the year 2011. It is important to understand Geomagnetic |
| | storms because they cause disturbances in satellites. Satellites were |
| | once rare and mostly government owned, but today they are more |
| | numerous and owned by many people. Today people heavily depend on |
| | satellites for weather information, television, communication, and |
| | navigation. A WAAS enabled GPS will be used to determine error signals |
| | given off. The latitude,longitude,and altitude will be found and the |
| | difference between the readings will be the error signal. Then, the Kp level |
| | of the Geomagnetic Storm will be found at the NOAA Space weather |
| | website. The relationship between error signal and Kp index level will be |
| | plotted out and mapped using Excel. |
| | |
| | Purpose: |
| | |
| | Why is this all-important? GPS is most important to people who drive |
| | into unfamiliar territories or go for hikes, business travelers who frequent |
| | new cities and towns. The system offers quick and accurate routing to |
| | locations in strange areas and so users are not stressed when looking for |
| | unknown locations while on road trips or vacations. There are many |
| | more reasons but GPS helps many find their way around the world. In this |
| | project the hypothesis is that Geomagnetic Storms does cause error |
| | signals in Wide Area Augmentation Systems (WAAS) enabled Global |
| | Positioning Systems (GPS). |
| | |
| | Results: |
| | |
| | After conducting and analyzing the results, the hypothesis that |
| | Geomagnetic storms cause error signal in the Wide Area Augmentation |
| | System is supported. In this research project the independent variable is |
| | the Geomagnetic Storm KP level, while the error signal calculated is the |
| | dependent variable. After analyzing the mode and median, it can be |
| | shown that during the month of November and December the KP level was |
| | generally at 4, which gives off a strong error signal. The median, which is |
| | also 4 KP shows that the latitude, longitude, and altitude, were greatest |
| | once the sun hit a KP level of 4. The median and mode help to understand |
| | what the suns activity and the effect it has on GPS activity during the past |
| | two months. Another statistical function is the correlation found for the |
| | latitude, longitude, and altitude. The latitude has a correlation of |
| | 0.70542127 which is significant. This correlation states that 70.5 percent |
| | of the time as KP level increases, error signal increases as well. Second, |
| | the longitude correlation is more significant at 0.829672768, which also |
| | says that 83 percent of the time as KP level increases so does error signal |
| | in GPS calculations. Lastly, the altitude correlation calculated is |
| | 0.946774383, resulting in the same concept as the latitude and longitude. |
| | These strong correlations support the hypothesis that Geomagnetic |
| | activity causes error signals in the Wide Area Augmentation System |
| | (WAAS). |