https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/03/10/tolar-solar-eclipse-science-projects-earth-sun
An excellent summary of our work by Kasha Patel:
Looking above the stratosphere, scientists will study eclipse effects on the ionosphere — where Earth’s atmosphere meets space. The ionosphere is home to all of the charged particles in Earth’s atmosphere and many of our satellites. Sudden changes in this layer, such as from an eclipse, could affect communication systems — at least that’s what some experts and citizen scientists are hoping to observe.
Through the HamSCI project, amateur radio operators, using high-frequency radios, will try to make contacts in as many different locations as they can during totality. During the eclipse, the sun temporarily stops electrifying the ionosphere, so signals could be heard from much farther away than usual or could disappear. Although the eclipse will be over North America, high-frequency radio signals could be transmitted across the world.
“For people who are not directly underneath the line of totality, they can actually listen to the eclipse on their radios,” said Ruth Bamford, a research scientist at Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. For instance, you might be able to hear a radio station before the eclipse but then have it disappear during the eclipse. Or a radio station could fade in and out during the eclipse.
Given that scientists know exactly when and where the moon’s shadow will occur in the eclipse, Bamford said they can model what they expect to happen and compare that against the observations. Although she is not part of the current HamSCI experiment, her previous experiments revealed how charges in the ionosphere recombine at different rates.
“This kind of experiment provides an enormous amount of data that we can’t get at any other time,” Bamford said. It “offers an opportunity for us to test our models of what the Earth’s atmosphere does.”
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