As announced in a recent report to SCAR, the Expert Group GRAPE ended its role in 2023. The GRAPE expertise, networking and capacity building acquired during these 10 years will not be lost! They are now embedded within the more ambitious PPG AGATA (Antarctic Geospace and ATmosphere reseArch, https://www.scar.org/science/agata/home/). The GRAPE web will be maintained in support of AGATA and for sharing news among the community.
Chief Officer: Giorgiana De Franceschi
Deputy Chief Officer: Nicolas Bergeot
Welcome to GRAPE
GRAPE (GNSS Research and Application for Polar Environment) is a joint GeoSciences and Physical Sciences Expert Group lasting from 2012 to 2023.
The International Polar Year (IPY) and International Heliophysical Year (IHY) initiatives left an important heritage in terms of data sharing, expertise exchange and increasing awareness of the current scientific capabilities. In particular, the GWSWF SCAR Action Group took advantage of the Interhemispheric Conjugacy Effects in Solar-Terrestrial and Aeronomy Research (ICESTAR) and the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET) experiences that lead to creation of working groups on specific themes such as the use of geodetic data to study weather and space weather events. The multidisciplinary approach of IPY is the key in overcoming relevant difficulties, above all, the poor coverage of Antarctica. GRAPE Expert group intend to continue to follow this route, intensifying the efforts to build a robust network of collaborations in order to answer a variety of space weather related needs through ad hoc data sharing and model development.
- Create and maintain distributed networks of specialized GPS/GNSS Ionospheric Scintillation and TEC Monitors particularly at high latitudes.
- Identify and quantify mechanisms that cause scintillation and control interhemispheric differences, asymmetries and commonalities in scintillation occurrence and intensity as a result of the geospace environment conditions.
- Develop ionospheric scintillation climatology, tracking and mitigation models to improve prediction capabilities of space weather.
- Retrieve tropospheric PWV for input to weather forecast models and to develop regional PWV climatology for atmospheric sensing in remote areas.
- Jennifer Hartisch (Leibniz-Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Germany), has been awarded as among the top five finalists at the prestigious Student Paper Competition within URSIGASS2023 with the paper "Observations of Kilometer-Scale Instabilities in the Polar Summer Mesosphere Resembling Varicose Mode Flows". Congratulations!
- AGATA PPG is glad to open a call for applications for scholarships to cover actual expenses up to 800-1000 € to support the attendance of students or Early Career Researchers to the next IUGG General Assembly (Berlin, 11-20 July 2023, https://www.iugg2023berlin.org/). READ MORE
- You are invited to join the webinar "Probing the polar ionosphere in-situ and remotely" , given by Dr. Wojciech Miloch (University of Oslo), 14 February 2023, at 13:00 UTC. Access here.
