Research Activity:

My research interests are mainly focused on:

- ionospheric physics

- radio wave propagation in the ionosphere

- ionospheric oscillations caused by Atmospheric Gravity Waves (AGW)

- autoscaling of vertical ionospheric soundings

- electron density irregularities at low latitudes, spread-F phenomena

- three dimensional electron density modelling of the ionosphere

- topside modelling

- E sporadic layer

- ionospheric turbulence

Within my research activity, I actively contributed to the development and continuous improvement of a software, called Autoscala (http://roma2.rm.ingv.it/en/facilities/software/18/autoscala), able to automatically scale ionospheric parameters from an ionogram.

The ionograms recorded at the Gibilmanna (Italy), Rome (Italy), San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina) and Bahia Blanca (Argentina) ionospheric stations by the AIS-INGV ionosonde, and autoscaled by Autoscala, are available real time at the site http://ionos.ingv.it/spaceweather/start.htm.

Autoscala was also applied to the ionograms recorded by the VISRC2 ionosonde installed at the Space Research Center Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland (http://rwc.cbk.waw.pl/iono/autoiono/index.php), and to the ionograms recorded by the AIS-Parus ionosonde installed at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Izmiran, Moscow, Russia (http://ionos.ingv.it/Moscow/latest.html).

I have recently developed a nowcasting version of the IRI model for the European region (2018, Surveys in Geophysics 39:169, doi:10.1007/s10712-017-9453-z) and conceived an improvement of the topside representation made by the NeQuick model (2019, Scientific Reports 9:12253, doi:10.1038/s41598-019-48440-6).

Moreover, I strongly contributed to the development of the electronic Space Weather upper atmosphere (eSWua) database (http://www.eswua.ingv.it/).