University of Calgary researchers find northern sensor array also has military value
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CALGARY – Researchers at the University of Calgary’s space weather network have attracted the attention of Canada’s military, the U.S. Navy and NATO with their eyes on the sky.
They run 22 ground-based, high-frequency remote sensors — resembling big metal umbrellas — are strung across Canada and in the northern United States, and monitor the near-Earth space environment.
Susan Skone, professor in the Department of Geomatics Engineering, said the sensors are important to study space, but also support real-time systems important in northern defence, natural resource exploration and telecommunications.
She said the sensors can determine what disruptions are naturally occurring and what might be caused by people.
“That allows us to detect jamming, spoofing, other forms of anomalous behaviour in Canada earth space environment,” Skone said.
She added that the team can feed the data into larger-scale models to find vulnerabilities and threats to navigation systems used by everyone, such as GPS.
“The GPS signals are vulnerable to natural and human-made interference, and are affected by exactly what we are resolving using these types of … instruments,” she said.
Emma Spanswick, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, said the information is particularly important as Canada works to modernize its defensive systems, including the development of a northward facing defensive radar system.
She said the technology has been around for the past 40 years and they have since begun collaborating with Canada’s Department of National Defence and with Defence Research and Development Canada.
“We started working with DND and DDRC to develop that capacity and some of these operational systems, which now use the model and the real time data and — boom — now we’ve got a system that’s supporting two distinctive classes of users,” she said.
“It is very cool.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 25, 2025.