James Sherwood
University of Massachusetts-Lowell, MA·Engineering
Storms of charged particles from the Sun can disturb the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of Earth's upper atmosphere that radio and satellite signals pass through. These disturbances, called space weather, can disrupt the communication and navigation technologies people rely on every day.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
space weather
ionosphere
ionospheric effects
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Establish a tenure-track faculty line in Electrical and Computer Engineering focused on space weather, especially how disturbances in the ionosphere affect communication and navigation technologies.
- Develop new space weather courses that bring geospace science, the study of Earth's surrounding space environment, into engineering and science curricula.
- Build interdisciplinary bridges between the PhD programs in aerospace science and aerospace engineering, together with the Physics and Environment, Earth and Atmospheric Science departments.
More about the research
Understanding them is the job of geospace science, the study of the space environment around Earth, including solar and space physics.
Why it matters
Communication and navigation technologies such as radio links and satellite positioning depend on signals that pass through the ionosphere, and space weather can disrupt them. By building space weather research and teaching at UMass Lowell, this effort could eventually improve understanding of these effects for engineers and operators of those systems. It also aims to train future specialists in geospace science.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katrina Bossert
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Physics
Establish an interdisciplinary space physics program focused on space plasma, ionospheric dynamics, the solar wind, and how the heliosphere responds to solar events.
Yukitoshi Nishimura
Boston University, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine how GPS position errors evolve during severe geomagnetic storms and how they relate to total electron content (TEC) structures in the ionosphere, using receiver data from the GAGE facility.
Tomoko Matsuo
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify the causes of day-to-day and longitude-to-longitude changes in the equatorial electrojet, a strong current near the magnetic equator, by assimilating ground and Swarm satellite magnetic data into the TIEGCM upper-atmosphere model.
The school
University of Massachusetts-Lowell: 7 labs on PI Pages, $121M a year on research, 149 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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