A polar tongue of ionization during a geomagnetic storm stretching from lower latitudes up over Canada, Greenland, and northern Europe and Asia.*

Yang Wang is leading a unique study harnessing satellite data to study how solar activity affects a poorly understood region of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Wang, a visiting faculty member in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and a 2021 graduate of CU Boulder’s aerospace PhD program, has earned a $699,018, four-year

“I’m going to be studying the responses of the Earth’s ionosphere to solar activities, particularly in the polar regions,” Wang said. “They are very complicated, coupled processes and are not very well modeled or understood.”

The ionosphere stretches from 48-965 km (30-600 mi) above Earth’s surface. Conditions in it are influenced by space weather, including solar flares and other activity from the sun.

Wang is focused specifically on phenomena called “polar patches and tongues of ionization,” where plasma in the ionosphere stretches out thousands of miles beyond its normal locations. When this occurs, steep electron density gradients can cause disruptions in satellite navigation and communications systems.

A major obstacle in improving our understanding is the difficulty in collecting data. Many studies of space weather analyze how radio signals from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) satellites pass through the ionosphere before reaching ground-receiving stations. At Earth’s poles, however, it is very difficult to deploy and maintain GNSS receivers.

Wang has discovered a new way to collect the data. GNSS signals beamed to Earth’s surface also bounce back up after hitting the ground and reflect into space, where they can be received by other satellites.

A constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbits are already collecting this reflected signal information as part of unrelated research, and NASA makes data available to researchers.

“It’s really exciting to observe the ionosphere in this way,” Wang said. “The hardware systems aren’t designed to do this, so there are some limitations, but this could help us understand what’s going on at high latitudes.”

Wang is developing algorithms to conduct processing and analysis of that data to ferret out new useful information from noise.

“We want to better understand the physical processes in the space environment from the sun to the Earth and advance our understanding of how these polar patches form, evolve, and propagate,” he said.

The grant represents a special validation for Wang; it is the first proposal he submitted as a PhD graduate and will enable his research for the next four years.

“To have my proposal be reviewed by NASA and be recognized, I’m very happy,” Wang said.

*Polar Tongue of Ionization rendering by under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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Yang Wang has earned the from the Institute of Navigation.

Wang, a visiting faculty member in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is being honored for his 2021 PhD thesis "Advanced GNSS Receiver Signal Processing and Remote Sensing Applications."

He received the award at the 2022 Institute of Navigation GNSS+ Conference, held in Denver September 19-23, 2022.

Wang holds a unique, three-year visiting faculty member appointment at CU Boulder created jointly by the Smead Aerospace, Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS), and Physics departments as well as the National Solar Observatory (NSO).

His research focuses on developing GNSS receiver carrier tracking algorithms, using spaceborne GNSS measurements for the Earth’s atmosphere and surface sensing, and ionosphere and space weather monitoring and forecasting.

The thesis award is named in honor of Bradford Parkinson, who led development of the U.S. Global Positioning System and the Satellite Division of the ION. The award recognizes an outstanding graduate student in the field of Position, Navigation, Timing (PNT) and/or Applications.

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Yang Wang is joining the Ann and H. J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences (AES) as a visiting faculty member, with a unique, three-year appointment created jointly with Smead Aerospace, Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS), and Physics departments as well as the National Solar Observatory (NSO).

His faculty position is part of a cooperative agreement with CU Boulder and NSO. Smead Aerospace is serving as his home department, where he will teach one graduate-level course each academic year. He will also develop course materials and teach a class through the CU/NSO COLLAGE program, which offers remote courses for graduate students at CU Boulder and a variety of universities.

Yang has been a research associate at the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR) since he obtained his PhD in aerospace engineering sciences from CU Boulder in 2021.

During his PhD study, he received the Outstanding Graduate Student in Research award and the Lockheed Martin Corporation Endowed Graduate Fellowship. Yang obtained his ME in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2016, and his BE in Electronic and Information Engineering from Beihang University in Beijing, China in 2013.

His research interests include developing GNSS receiver carrier tracking algorithms, using spaceborne GNSS measurements for the Earth’s atmosphere and surface sensing, and ionosphere and space weather monitoring and forecasting.

He enjoys spending time with his family, hiking, and skiing.

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