The Feasibility of Detecting Magnetic Storms With Smartphone Technology

Abstract

In this paper, recent comparison tests are performed on smartphone magnetometer “apps”with a view toward their suitability for detecting and measuring magnetic storm events. Although the iPhone and Samsung smartphone magnetometer sensors in this study have a nominal sensitivity of ±150 nT, this “digitization”noise level is not a Gaussian process and cannot be further reduced by co-adding more measurements to obtain √N improvements. Moreover, there are a variety of systematic effects including apparently uncontrollable glitches and “dc”baseline changes that have amplitudes of ±2000 nT during long-term measurement operations. These systematic variations appear to mask the detection of all but the strongest geomagnetic storms with K > 8. It is possible that other existing smartphones outside this study have improved magnetic sensors, and that future improvements in sensor design may change these conclusions, so a continued study of this issue is warranted.

Keywords

• Smart devices
• wireless sensor networks
• event detection
• knowledge engineering
• crowd-sourcing
• data analysis