Progress of International Meridian Circle Program

In 2024,the Chinese Meridian Project(CMP)completed its construction,deploying 282 instruments across 31 stations.This achievement not only provides a robust foundation but also serves as a reference template for the International Meridian Circle Program(IMCP).The IMCP aims to integrate and establish a comprehensive network of ground-based monitoring stations designed to track the propagation of space weather events from the Sun to Earth.Additionally,it monitors various disturbances generated within the Earth system that impact geospace.Over the past two years,significant progress has been made on the IMCP.In particular,the second phase of construction for the China-Brazil Joint Laboratory for Space Weather has been completed,and the North Pole and Southeast Asia networks are under active construction.The 2024 IMCP joint observation campaign was successfully conducted.To facilitate these developments,the scientific program committee of IMCP was established,following the success of 2023 IMCP workshop and the space weather school,which was co-hosted with the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization(APSCO)and sponsored by Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS)and Scientific Committee on Solar-Terrestrial Physics(SCOSTEP).Preparations are now underway for the 2024 workshop in collaboration with the National Institute for Space Research(INPE)in Brazil.

International Meridian Circle Program

The Earth is buffered from the ferocious onslaught of the solar wind by a thin layer of matter known as the atmosphere and geospace.This layer absorbs energy from irradiance and outburst from the Sun,as well as from disasters,transient phenomena and anthropogenic emissions originated from Earth.Through complicated physics,the absorbed energy changes the atmospheric and geospace state and sometimes gets re-released to power extreme events such as space weather.Taking place globally,these complicated processes cannot be understood unless they are studied globally.The Chinese scientists have proposed the International Meridian Circle Program(IMCP)to meet this demand.By operating nearly 1000 instruments encompassing all latitudes along with the 120°E–60°W longitudes,IMCP aims,for the first time,to construct comprehensive 3D data representation of the atmosphere and geospace on a global scale and empower interdisciplinary research to tackle key questions related to Earth’s environment and climate change.

Progress of International Meridian Circle Program

Based on the Chinese Meridian Project(CMP),the International Meridian Circle Program(IMCP)aims to coordinate the deployment of a comprehensive ground-based monitoring network along the 120°E-60°W Great Meridian Circle to track the propagation and evolution of space weather events from the Sun to the Earth,as well as the imprints of other major natural and anthropic hazards on the ionosphere,the middle and upper atmosphere.Currently,we have completed the IMCP headquarters building in Beijing and established the China-Brazil Joint Laboratory for Space Weather in cooperation with Brazil.Meanwhile,the Chinese Meridian Project PhaseⅡand different components of the IMCP observation system are under construction.

Scientific challenges and instrumentation for the International Meridian Circle Program

Earth’s ecosystems and human activities are threatened by a broad spectrum of hazards of major importance for the safety of ground infrastructures,space systems and space flight:solar activity,earthquakes,atmospheric and climatic disturbances,changes in the geomagnetic field,fluctuations of the global electric circuit.Monitoring and understanding these major hazards to better predict and mitigate their effects is one of the greatest scientific and operational challenges of the 21st century.Though diverse,these hazards share one feature in common:they all leave their characteristic imprints on a critical layer of the Earth’s environment:its ionosphere,middle and upper atmosphere(IMUA).The objective of the International Meridian Circle Program(IMCP),a major international program led by the Chines Academy of Sciences(CAS),is to deploy,integrate and operate a global network of research and monitoring instruments to use the IMUA as a screen on which to detect these imprints.In this article,we first show that the geometry required for the IMCP global observation system leads to a deployment of instruments in priority along the 120°E-60°W great meridian circle,which will cover in an optimal way both the dominant geographic and geomagnetic latitude variations,possibly complemented by a second Great Circle along the 30°E-150°W meridians to capture longitude variations.Then,starting from the Chinese Meridian Project(CMP)network and using it as a template,we give a preliminary and promising description of the instruments to be integrated and deployed along the 120°E-60°W great circle running across China,Australia and the Americas.

Fertilizer sphericity measuring device based on equatorial and meridian circles

Fertilizer sphericity is an important assessment index of appearance quality that affects the fertilization effect.A fertilizer sphericity measuring device based on machine vision was designed aimed at low precision and heavy workload of manual fertilizer measurement,and high cost and complicated operation of high precision measuring instruments.A fertilizer sphericity measuring method based on equatorial and meridian circles was proposed.The device works in an intermittent static acquisition mode to simultaneously obtain both top and side images of a single fertilizer.First,the method performs gamma correction on the top and side images of the single fertilizer,and uses the Canny operator to detect the edge of the image to obtain the equatorial and meridian circular contour images of the fertilizer.Second,based on the fertilizer equatorial and meridian circular contour,the Least Squares Circle method was used to evaluate the roundness of the single fertilizer.Finally,the average roundness value of the equatorial and meridian circles was used as the final sphericity value of the fertilizer.The sphericity measurement test was carried out on the same batch of compound,organic and biological fertilizers by using the sphericity measuring device.The fertilizer sphericity data were obtained by different measurement and evaluation methods.The variation coefficient was used to evaluate the difference in fertilizer sphericity measured by different sphericity measurement and evaluation methods.The results show that among the different measurement and evaluation methods,the coefficient of variation of fertilizer sphericity measured by the equatorial and meridian circle method was the smallest,and the coefficient of variation of sphericity measured by the Least Squares Circle method was the smallest and accurate.This study shows that the sphericity measuring device and method can accurately measure the fertilizer sphericity,and has a significant potential to facilitate fertilizer production and quality inspection.

New form of geodetic coordinate system taking two length quantity as coordinate parameters

A new form of geodetic coordinate system based on geodesic coordinates instead of geodetic longitude and latitude was proposed.The vertical and horizontal geodesic coordinates measured with length were defined as coordinate parameters,but the two families of coordinate curves were still meridians and parallel circles.The first fundamental form on the ellipsoidal surface and its three coefficients were deduced by the geodesic coordinate.The formula for the latitudinal scale factor of length for geodetic parallel lines was derived,by which the obtained result conformed to that standard value calculated from geodetic latitude,and it is applicable in the range of 400 km from north to south.Therefore,it lays the foundation for establishing the differential equation and differential relationship based on this type of coordinate parameters;and consequently,it is convenient and accurate enough to operate on the ellipsoidal surface in this new form of geodetic coordinate system.