GPS jamming affecting Finnish Meteorological Institute weather balloons at Sodankyla (2023)
What happened
In November 2023 Jyri Heilimo, head of the Finnish Meteorological Institute's Arctic Space Centre at Sodankyla, told the Finnish broadcaster Yle that positioning had been lost several times on the radiosonde balloons the centre releases twice daily. The balloons rise to 15 to 20 kilometres and their GPS locators are what give wind speed and the landing point, so a loss of positioning is a loss of the data the launch exists to produce. The Sodankyla Arctic Space Centre is designated critical infrastructure in Finland and its observations are distributed internationally by fibre and satellite link as one node in a network of Arctic forecasting sites. Finnish authorities suspect Russian origin: GPS jamming from the Pechenga region and other locations on the Kola Peninsula has troubled civil aviation, search and rescue and construction in the Nordic north since 2018 and intensified after February 2022, and Finland has measured jamming affecting northern airports including Ivalo, about 50 kilometres from Russia's Murmansk region.
Attribution here is suspicion, not finding: the source's own headline says Finland suspects Russia, the centre head says only that positioning has been lost, and no Finnish government finding attributing these specific balloon losses to jamming, still less to a named actor, is cited. Traficom, the Finnish regulator, attributes GNSS interference in Finland to a mix of causes including environmental shadowing, space weather, faulty equipment and deliberate jamming. The record is in the corpus because it is the clearest documented case in this batch of GNSS interference degrading a scientific observation system rather than a transport user: the consequence is loss of an atmospheric dataset, not a navigation hazard.
Attack vector
Suspected ground-based GNSS-band jamming from Russian electronic warfare locations on the Kola Peninsula, reaching the airspace above a fixed Arctic observation site in Finnish Lapland.
Operational impact
Repeated loss of the GPS positioning solution on radiosonde balloons released twice daily from Sodankyla, jeopardising the wind-speed and landing-point data those launches produce and, on the centre head's account, the wider forecasting chain that consumes it. The number of affected launches is given only as 'a few times'.
Affected segments
user, link
Disclosed
2023-11-22
SPARTA techniques evidenced
Each row is a technique this record evidences, with the reasoning and the source that attests to it.
What relationship, confidence, and evidence mean on the rows below
- Relationship
What kind of link this is between the technique and the target.
Mitigates: the target actively prevents, detects, or recovers from the technique.
Addresses: the target governs the technique or is relevant to it, without interdicting it. Most governance and policy obligations sit here.
Triggers obligation: the technique occurring is what triggers the duty the target imposes.
Relates to: related to the technique, but the target neither interdicts nor governs it. Used sparingly.
- Confidence
How strongly the source supports this mapping, not how severe the technique is.
High: the source supports the mapping squarely.
Moderate: supported, with a qualification such as a cross-tactic reading that stays operationally sound.
Low: the source reaches the technique only in part.
- Evidence
How close to the source text the mapping was made.
Direct: a verbatim excerpt of the cited source was read against the technique, and the rationale argues from that excerpt.
Derived: the mapping follows from the source's scope or structure, with no on-point excerpt addressing the technique.
Inferred: reached by composition through another framework, or by domain reasoning the source does not support on its face.
The reported effect is repeated loss of the GPS positioning solution on radiosondes released from a fixed Arctic site, in a region where Finnish authorities record sustained GNSS jamming originating from Kola Peninsula sources and where the national regulator counts interference events in the hundreds to thousands per year. That is EX-0016.03's consequence clause, degraded or unavailable position and time solutions because signals are not acquired or tracked, and its note that mobile emitters produce intermittent outages fits the reported pattern. Derived rather than direct because the causal link from jamming to these specific losses is reported as suspicion, not as a measurement, and because Traficom lists several non-hostile causes of GNSS interference in Finland.
Temporary impairment of the use of a system, IMP-0002's definition: positioning on the balloons failed intermittently, jeopardising the wind-speed and landing-point data the twice-daily launches exist to produce, with normal operation resuming between events. The impaired system is a scientific observation service rather than a navigation user, which is not a distinction IMP-0002 draws. Derived because no source characterises the effect in impact terms; that characterisation is this record's.
Considered and not mapped
These techniques were considered for this record because a source, a related record or SPARTA's own catalogue pointed at them. Each was read against what the sources say and not mapped. The reason is given in full.
No source describes a falsified position on any balloon. Positioning was lost, not moved. This is exactly the "could have happened" case the corpus excludes.
Parent of the sub-technique mapped. Also in the starting set.
This is one of the two techniques SPARTA's bibliography cites for this incident, and rejecting it is the most contestable call in this record. EX-0016.02's own description, a jammer targeting the users of a satellite by creating noise on the downlink frequency, needing only to match the signal strength arriving at the ground terminal, and located within the terminal antenna's field of view, is a literally accurate description of GNSS jamming. It would carry this event.
EX-0016.03is preferred on the prefer-the-specific rule that governs the regulation mappings: it names the GNSS band, names the PNT consequence, and exists precisely to be the PNT case of EX-0016. An editor who prefers to follow SPARTA's own bibliography placement here has a real argument and this rejection should be reviewed rather than accepted. Same call is made innorwegian-aviation-gps-jamming-2024.
Sources
The published accounts this record rests on. The tier is SafeMode Space's own assessment of the source, and the reason for it is given beside it. What the tiers mean and how they are assigned: the source tiers.
A source is listed when a mapped technique rests on it, or when it disputes the account. One the curators read but neither cited nor recorded as disputing the record is not listed, so an absence here means neither is true rather than that nobody looked.
Tier 2: Named independent Nordic news outlet with a named journalist, quoting the head of the affected institute directly. It reports Yle's interview rather than conducting its own, and its attribution to Russia is framed as suspicion, so not Tier 1.
Tier 1: The Finnish national transport and communications regulator's own monitoring statistics, covering all GNSS frequencies across aviation, maritime and terrestrial services.
Every source SafeMode Space reproduces, and on what terms: sources and attribution.