UAH VLF Antenna Python Software Development

Solar flares are powerful releases of electromagnetic energy in the solar atmosphere, which are observed at all wavelengths from radio waves to gamma-rays. For flaring monitoring, major agencies rely nowadays on measurements of solar soft X-ray emission such as from the GOES spacecraft observations, although other ground-based flare monitoring activity exist, e.g. in H-alpha observations.

Nevertheless, flares can also be monitored by considering the propagation of radio waves of distant VLF transmitters which not only gives information about the flare but also about the actual impact on the Earth. The VLF monitoring station at the University of Alcala has been working since 2017 capturing the signal from different stations around the world. The recent increase in activity of the Sun has provided several flares that have allowed to obtain actual data of ionospheric disturbances and the evaluation of procedures to obtain a proper nowcasting of the disturbances towards a validation with GOES data.