Global Ionospheric Radio Observatory (GIRO): Status and prospective

The Global Ionospheric Radio Observatory (GIRO), http://giro.uml.edu, acquires and disseminates HF ionospheric sounding data from 64 Digisonde locations in 27 countries. GIRO publishes its 30+ million record holdings over the Internet, provides an interactive read/write environment to experts of data interpretation, and forwards real-time data for measurement assimilation and radio propagation and space weather forecast. Of importance to the ionospheric community are the long-term data holdings of manually validated electron density profiles for modeling purposes, studies of the autoscaling uncertainty, and validation of alternative measurement techniques. Real-time GIRO feeds will be used to build an assimilative International Reference Ionosphere model.