The blue dots indicate locations with telephone measurements; Yellow dots indicate locations with measuring stations
Data from 40 million Android cell phones in every city around the world helped create the most complete map of the ionosphere ever made.
40 million cell phones created the map more detailed than ionosphereto date.
It seems surprising, but the truth is that measurements made with smartphones they cover twice as much of the ionosphere as traditional scientific stations.
Basically, every city with at least one cell phone becomes a monitoring station. So it’s likely there was a cell phone near you contributing to this map.
The blue dots indicate locations with telephone measurements; Yellow dots indicate locations with measuring stations
The ionosphere is a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that extends approximately 50 to 1000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. This layer is crucial for the propagation of radio waves over long distances around the planet.
In the study, this Wednesday at Naturethe research team analyzed data from 40 million Androids, evaluating how charged particles in the ionosphere influence the travel time of radio signals between cell phones and GPS satellites.
As explained by , traditionally, this method was considered impractical due to the high noise of data collected by cell phones, which can be 30 times noisier than that of dedicated GPS stations.
However, to overcome this challenge, researchers aggregated measurements from millions of devices, which allowed them to create a clearer map of ionospheric conditions, adjusted for the smaller antennas and less advanced GPS hardware of cell phones.
Google intends to use this method to increase accuracy of location services GPSpotentially reducing location errors by several meters.
Continued use of cell phone data to monitor the ionosphere could also facilitate prediction of solar storms and other real-time space weather phenomena.
A recent example occurred in May, when the system helped assess the effects of a geomagnetic storm that affected Earth.
The new method has, however, limitations, such as the need for broad cell phone coverage, which leaves out oceans and unpopulated areas.
