XPost: rec.radio.info

HamSCI Founder Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF, Awarded $481,260 NASA
Research Grant
09/08/2021

Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) founder Nathaniel
Frissell, W2NAF — an assistant professor in The University of
Scranton’s Physics and Engineering Department — has been awarded a
$481,260 grant through the NASA Space Weather Applications Operations
Phase II Research Program. Frissell will serve as principal
investigator for a research project entitled, “Enabling Space Weather
Research with Global Scale Amateur Radio Datasets.” He’ll collaborate
with Philip Erickson, W1PJE, of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Haystack Observatory and Bill Engelke, AB4EJ, at the
University of Alabama.

“This grant includes significant funding for participation of Scranton undergraduate students in this research, as well as support for new
computation resources,” Frissell said. He explained that the grant
will fund “the development of an empirical model for the prediction of traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs) in high-frequency radio communications while investigating the geophysical drivers of these disturbances.” The grant will cover 2 years of work.

Frissell said that the predictive, empirical TID models will be
developed using data collected by the Reverse Beacon Network, WSPR,
and PSKreporter — automated, global-scale radio communication
observation networks operated by the amateur radio community.
Undergraduate students will help the faculty researchers to create
algorithms used for the model development.

This new NASA award complements a 5-year National Science Foundation
grant of more than $616,000 that Frissell received in 2020. That
investigation aims to understand the source of TIDs observed in
amateur radio and other scientific datasets.

In 2019, Frissell received a $1.3 million National Science Foundation
grant to fund a 3-year initiative to measure modulations produced in
the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The grant supports a collaborative team
to develop the HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station, a modular, multi-instrument, ground-based space science observation platform used
to study variability in the coupled geospace system and to better
understand HF radio propagation.

This is Frissell’s second NASA grant. A space physicist, he is among
the researchers working on a NASA Living with a Star Program (LWS)
project, “Wave-Driven Asymmetries in the Ionosphere-Thermosphere due
to Asymmetries in the Northern and Southern Polar Vortices.” That
project is being led by Richard Collins of the University of Alaska
Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.

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