Citizen science observations by hams during last
summer's total solar eclipse are the focus of a scientific paper,
"Modeling Amateur Radio Soundings of the Ionospheric Response to the 2017
Great American Eclipse," which has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal
of the American Geophysical Union. The paper, whose lead author is HamSci
organizer Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF, highlighted the real-world findings of
radio amateurs participating in the Solar Eclipse QSO Party as compared to scientific
predictions.
According to the paper's abstract, the QSO party was "the
first eclipse-ionospheric study to make use of measurements from a
citizen-operated, global-scale, HF propagation network and develop tools for comparison
to a physics-based model ionosphere." At press time, it had not been
announced in which issue of the Letters journal
the paper would be published.