Yukitoshi Nishimura
Boston University, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
GPS guides farm machinery, autonomous vehicles and countless everyday services, but its accuracy suffers during geomagnetic storms, disturbances in Earth's magnetic field and upper atmosphere driven by solar activity. These storms reshape the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere that GPS signals pass through, and introduce position errors.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
Engineering
- Topics
positioning errors
geomagnetic storms
space weather
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Determine how GPS position errors evolve during severe geomagnetic storms and how they relate to total electron content (TEC) structures in the ionosphere, using receiver data from the GAGE facility.
- Analyze how mid-latitude North American GPS position errors depend on storm strength, storm progression, receiver location and season.
- Identify the physical and technical processes controlling position errors by modifying input data and positioning algorithms and measuring how the errors change.
More about the research
Mid-latitudes, such as most of North America, are densely populated, so understanding GPS performance there matters for many users.
Why it matters
Quantifying GPS position errors during geomagnetic storms and identifying ways to reduce them could make satellite navigation more reliable for agriculture, autonomous vehicles and other GPS-dependent services across densely populated mid-latitude regions, supporting better space weather preparedness.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shasha Zou
University of Michigan, MI·Physics
Track how the global ionospheric total electron content (TEC) changes over time during solar flares, using TEC data from worldwide GNSS satellite-navigation receivers paired with solar radiation from the FISM2 model or SDO EVE observations.
James Sherwood
University of Massachusetts-Lowell, MA·Engineering
Establish a tenure-track faculty line in Electrical and Computer Engineering focused on space weather, especially how disturbances in the ionosphere affect communication and navigation technologies.
Xian Lu
Clemson University, SC·Physics
Determine the role of Alfvén waves in producing auroral arcs, compared with steady particle precipitation, using midnight short-wave infrared all-sky imaging combined with photometers, imagers and the PFISR radar at Poker Flat.
The school
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
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