SMART Ground Based Magnetometer Array - an Initial Look

Augsburg University has been involved with ground based magnetometers for the past 25 or so years. These magnetometers monitor the earth's magnetic field and its changes as the ionospheric field is perturbed by solar wind and other influences. As part of an array of detectors, we monitor the fields here in Minnesota with a flux gate magnetometer as part of the UCLA "Smart" array. This detector is sensitive to about 10 nano tesla and located in an electronically quiet hillside. 

In addition, in the past few years a number of solid state detectors have been integrated into easy to monitor circuits and mated with the Raspberry Pi microcomputer. Most of these cost a few dollars and if placed away from metalic influence can give reasonable measurements – especially of large changes in local field. Specifically, we will show the output from the LIS3MDL magnetometer compared to a high cost fluxgate system. Also discussed are the GY-511(LSM303) and GY-271 (HMC5883L) Compass/Magnetometers. 

These data are passed to io.adafruit.com a cloud storage/plotting system that provides access to plots and data for other to monitor. Cloud services allow many users to access a wide network of data without any programming or management of the cloud. With the onset of the next solar cycle, home monitors will become useful in propagation estimates.