Brazil Space Weather: Assessment of Space Weather Impact on Precision Agriculture Using the Global Navigation Satellite System in Brazilian Farms

In Brazil, equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs) are the primary space weather phenomenon impacting the performance of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), causing signal disruptions and positional inaccuracies in agricultural machinery used for mapping fields, guiding equipment, and ensuring accurate planting, chemical application, and harvesting. As a result, farmers and stakeholders face challenges in maintaining accurate operational capabilities, often needing to shut down machinery to mitigate these effects. This project evaluates the feasibility of using NASA’s Heliophysics observations for a case study in March 2024. Focusing on this month of observations narrows the perspective to align with the harvest season in Brazil, corresponding with a profitable, relevant time of the year. Data from NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) instrument is used to characterize EPBs, while amplitude and phase scintillation indices from ground-based GNSS receivers confirm their presence and impact on signal disruptions. Additionally, we assessed the practical implications of these disruptions on Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GNSS-based operations using data from a local rover receiver to calculate the two-dimensional (2D) error and evaluate the impact on crop yield using harvest data. The project involved collaboration across multiple different organizations and sectors, including John Deere in Brazil for equipping agricultural tools with GNSS technology, Pamplona Farm owned by SLC Agrícola for data acquisition, and São Paulo University for data processing. The results aim to inform Brazilian farmers about position errors affecting their precision agriculture operations, formulate suggestions as to processing relevant data for the purpose of farming, and provide insights into the needs of space weather data users. Lessons from this case study will guide future integration of space weather data and modeling with end users.