A flexible and robust direct reconstruction method for magnetospheric radio tomography

Abstract

We present a flexible and robust direct reconstruction method for magnetospheric radio tomography. We show that for a combined reconstruction of plasma density Ne and magnetic field B, the direct reconstruction method performs as well as popular iterative methods such as algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) and multiplicative algebraic reconstruction technique (MART) for large number of satellites, but it performs significantly better when the number of satellites is small. The main advantages of this method are that extra information, such as in situ measurements, can be easily and flexibly incorporated into the reconstruction; it is relatively robust in the presence of noise; and it is less sensitive than other methods to numerical reconstruction parameters like assumed grid size. We demonstrate the good performance of this method in reconstructing electron density and magnetic field using constellations of relatively few satellites (11 and fewer) in a single orbit in a variety of magnetospheric regions. Although this method is relatively robust to noisy measurements, local measurements can significantly increase the reconstruction accuracy.