The International GIRO Forum (IGF) gathers teams of ionosonde operators, engineers, data analysts, radio enthusiasts, and students to discuss a variety of topics related to good practices of HF ionosounding. By popular demand, the first day of this event in 2025 is a Pre-forum Science Day dedicated to cutting-edge science with ionosondes. The rest of the week of 22-26 September, 2025 is a training and strategizing workshop, hosted jointly by LDI and UMass Lowell, where participants discuss the latest research and development at the Global Ionosphere Radio Observatory (GIRO) and data offerings at the Lowell GIRO Data Center (LGDC). Experts give lead talks on new measurement capabilities of the Digisonde family of instrumentation, associated research applications, data dissemination and archiving, quality control, and scientific data interpretation. The participants attend hands-on sessions ranging in topics from data analysis to software tips-and-tricks and hardware troubleshooting.

Specific topics covered at IGF 2025:

• Space weather applications, including
  • AI-driven algorithms for forecasting the ionosphere
  • The "Real-Time IRI" global assimilative model IRTAM based on GIRO data streams
  • TID Detection and Warning System using Digisonde-to-Digisonde (D2D) oblique sounding
  • Real-time monitoring of optimal HF communications
• Coordinated science and operations
  • Peak Density Thickness: a multi-instrument study
  • High cadence ionogramming and skymapping at the HAARP ionospheric heating facility
  • Cooperative real-time GIRO, GNSS, and COSMIC II specification of 3D ionosphere
• Modeling ionosphere
  • D-region specification using DPS4D ionograms and GPSII
  •  pyNeDIPP: Python-based Ne Data-driven models of Ionosphere, Plasmasphere, and Polar cap 
  •  Ionosphere Disturbance Index 
•  Automatic Data Prospecting 
  •  ARTIST and LOIA automatic ionogram interpreters 
  •  Earthquake precursors in ionosonde measurements 
•  Instrument Development 
  •  Hardware and software advances for the latest Digisonde instrumentation 
•  Data Management and Dissemination 
  •  Web portal to Lowell GIRO Data Center, including DIDBase, TID Warning System, and GAMBIT coefficients for the real-time assimilative IRI 
  •  SAO-V6: new ionosonde data exchange standard

Attendees include scientists, engineers, radio enthusiasts, and anyone interested in ionospheric sounding research and analysis. The workshop is seen as a valuable resource by the ionospheric research community: "The work sessions that allow for 1&1 interaction are extremely valuable, also the combination of science & technical is very important" – L.A. McKinnell. 

IGF 2025 will be hosted at historic UMass Lowell Wannalancit building, home to Lowell National Park Turbine Exhibition.