University of Massachusetts Lowell

The University of Massachusetts Lowell is a NEASC-accredited public research university that participates in PITHIA project with its Space Science Laboratory (SSL) of the Department of Physics and Applied Physics. The SSL unit continues the heritage established by UML Center of Atmospheric Research founded in 1974 with the goal of conducting experimental and analytical research in the atmospheric and space sciences. The UML SSL operates the Global Ionospheric Radio Observatory (GIRO), https://giro.uml.edu, that serves as the main data portal for a distributed network of high frequency ionospheric sounders, mostly Digisondes; a Resident Archive of the Radio Plasma Imager (RPI) instrument on NASA IMAGE satellite; and a near-real-time extension of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) model of global ionospheric plasma distribution, IRTAM, that assimilates data from contributing GIRO sites.