Webinar: An African Instrumentation Network for Space Weather Forecasting
The South African National Space Agency is host to the only Space Weather Regional Warning Centre in Africa that operates as part of the International Space Environment Service (ISES). SANSA’s Space Weather Centre provides an important service by monitoring the Sun and its activity to provide space weather forecasts, warnings, alerts, and environmental data on space weather conditions.
Space weather products and services are required primarily for communication and navigation systems in the aviation, defence, navigation and communication sectors. The operational space weather centre requires real-time data for the products and to this end SANSA launched the African Instrumentation Network project. This project was developed to support the flow of real-time data to the new operational Space Weather Centre. SANSA is now deploying more instruments across Africa to increase accuracy and reliability, and address data gaps in Africa.
This webinar will discuss the value this network adds to international space weather monitoring, as well as the potential for partnerships across Africa as well as globally.
The webinar will be facilitated by Dr. Amoré Nel.
Dr. Nel attained her BSc in Applied Mathematics at the University of Stellenbosch and her BSc(Hons) in Astrophysics at the University of the Free State. She was awarded the South African National Space Agency Masters Scholarship and attained her MSc at the North-West University studying near-Earth solar turbulence. She then earned her PhD in Space Physics in 2019, reporting on the discovery and analysis of a new type of aurora while on fieldwork in Norway. She was part of the 2018/2019 Antarctic take-over team doing routine maintenance on the scientific instrumentation at the South African Antarctic base. Her postdoctoral work was at the Helmholtz GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences (Potsdam, Germany), where focus was on recording and analysing magnetometer observatory data, Southern African regional geomagnetic field models, and external geomagnetic field studies using joint satellite and ground-based observatory data.
Her areas of interest have been studying near-Earth solar turbulence and the solar-cycle dependences of solar turbulence quantities, upper atmosphere studies using incoherent scatter radar and optical methods to investigate small-scale auroras in Norway and abrupt secular variation changes in Earth's geomagnetic field.
Currently, she is the applied geomagnetic researcher at SANSA Space Science. She aims to further Pan-African geomagnetic research and innovation by deploying magnetometer stations near and adjacent to the magnetic equator in the African sector. She is passionate about promoting international cooperation in the field of Space Science.