Modeling HamSCI HF Doppler Observations with PyLAP/SAMI3 in Preparation for the 2023/2024 North American Solar Eclipses

The HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station (PSWS) network is composed of ground-based space physics instrumentation aimed at Citizen Scientists and the amateur radio community. This instrumentation includes Grape receivers, which are low-cost high frequency (HF) Doppler receivers that use GPS-disciplined oscillators to make precise frequency measurements of signals from standards such as WWV. These measurements can provide insight into ionospheric variability, including Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (TIDs), diurnal variations, and ionospheric impacts due to Solar eclipses. Plans are underway to use this system to take ionospheric measurements during the upcoming October 14, 2023 annular and April 8, 2024 total North American solar eclipses. These observations, combined with eclipsed versions of physics-based SAMI3 ionospheric model, will be used to address the following research questions: (1) How do dawn and dusk ionospheric variability vary with local time, season, latitude, longitude, frequency, distance, and direction from the transmitter, (2) is the ionospheric effect symmetric with respect to onset and recovery, (3) how eclipse effects are similar to typical day to night variations, (4) will the multipath HF mode-splitting be similar to the effect of dawn, and (5) would these behaviors be different for two different eclipses? This poster presents initial SAMI3 model predictions of the eclipsed ionospheres and demonstrates the use of the PyLAP raytracing toolkit to model HF Doppler Observations collected by Grape receivers.