Automated Methods for Studying Long Scale Ionospheric Disturbances and Climatology

During the last year we have been pushing forward with improving our methods for detecting and studying Large Scale Ionospheric Disturbances (LSTIDs) using amateur radio spots from the RBN, WSPR, and PSK databases. We now have automated systems in place to collect and archive these data daily. We developed a way to detect the minimum useful range and extract a curve from that; we can then use a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to estimate the period, amplitude, and occurrences of these LSTIDs, leading to an improvement in our capability to study the climatology (long term trends) of these waves in plasma density.