Welcome

You are on the Sudden Ionospheric Disturbances Monitoring Station A118 website. Welcome!

The solar flares release energy that affect the near Earth environment and particularly a part of the atmosphere called ionosphere.

Through monitoring of the propagation of radio communication signals, this station aims at detecting some of the ionospheric effects resulting from solar flares. Those effects are known as Sudden Ionospheric Disturbances, or SIDs.

This station is an amateur observatory located in France. Operational since early 2006, it has received the AAVSO observer code A118 in July 2006 and provides data to a coordinated network of observers around the world.

This website gives you access to real time measurements collected by the station and to a database of SID events observed so far.

I have also include general and basic information related to ionosphere, and to Sudden Ionospheric Disturbances and their detection principle.

This website aims also at providing information for building your own station. The construction of the various parts is described: the VLF antenna, the VLF receiver and the data acquisition and processing software.

I hope you will enjoy this site. Comments and suggestions are more than welcome, so do not hesitate!

The origins...

Early 2005, a Sky & Telescope article mentioned the recording by an amateur astronomer of the effect of a GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) on the Earth ionosphere. This amateur was monitoring radio signals transmitted by VLF (Very Low Frequency) stations hundreds to thousands miles away.

As a child, I used to spend many hours in astronomy books or under the skies. Today, professional constraints impose me to live under light polluted skies and to be less and less available for watching the stars. The monitoring of SID (Sudden Ionospheric Disturbances) appeared to me as a good means to come back to astronomy and gave me the opportunity of discovering a whole new world...
Less than a year after reading the S&T article, after hundreds of hours surfing the web and seeking information, making the VLF receiver and writing software, the SID Monitoring Station was operational.

Latest News

Fix of a bug in the data plot
11 May 2013 21:19 UTC
A problem in a script could limit the number of displayed data channels. This problem is now corrected and all nine channels can be shown on the same graph.
Update of the list of Time Stations
10 May 2013 17:50 UTC
The Time Signal Stations kml file (Google Earth) was updated with new stations.
Solar Activity Plots evolutions
07 May 2013 22:20 UTC
Several changes were done to the solar activity page to improve the graphs clarity. Also, a new plot showing the sunspot number was added.
GOES Primary Satellite Change
26 Nov 2012 08:15 UTC
GOES-15 Returns as Primary X-ray Sensor. The X-ray measurements shown on this site account for this change that took place on November 19, 2012.
GOES Primary Satellite Change
02 Nov 2012 11:55 UTC
GOES 14 replaced GOES 15 as the Primary SWPC GOES X-ray Satellite. The X-ray measurements shown on this site account for this change that took place on October 23, 2012.

[View News Archive...]

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