This project is funded through the NSF Translation to Practice (TTP) program, which supports efforts to turn research discoveries into practical tools that benefit communities, industry, and society. Solar storms can knock out the radio communications that aircraft, ships, and emergency responders depend on — sometimes for hours at a time, with serious safety and economic consequences. A key reason these outages are difficult to predict and manage is that a particular layer of the atmosphere that lies at the edge of space, called the D-region, remains largely unmeasured and poorly understood. Sitting roughly 40 to 55 miles above Earth's surface, the D-region is too high for weather balloons and too low for satellites to reach directly. This TTP-P award supports a team at Georgia Tech, in partnership with the weather technology company Vaisala Inc., to build a system for mapping the D-region continuously and in near real time across the entire globe. The team uses radio signals produced by lightning — which strike millions of times each day worldwide — to detect and track conditions in this difficult-to-reach atmospheric layer, in a way that is similar to how doctors use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to see inside the body. Better knowledge of the D-region will help airline and maritime operators manage radio communication during solar storms, help power grid operators prepare for damaging solar disturbances that can cause blackouts, and strengthen backup navigation and timing systems in case a Global Positioning System (GPS) becomes unreliable. The ionospheric D-region (60–90 kilometer altitude) is the primary absorber of the high-frequency radio signals used by aviation, maritime, military, and emergency communications. It is also the atmospheric layer most directly affected by solar X-ray emissions during space weather events. Despite its importance, real-time D-region monitoring remains limited. A leading operational product — National Oceanic an