A simple ionospheric correction method for radar-based space surveillance systems, with performance assessment on GRAVES data

Abstract

Ionospheric effects degrade the quality of radar data, which are critical for the precision of the satellite ephemeris produced by space surveillance systems; this degradation is especially noticeable for radars such as GRAVES that operate in the very high frequency range. This article presents a simple and effective method to correct for ionospheric effects, with an evaluation on data obtained with GRAVES, the French space surveillance radar. This method relies on GPS data, and our evaluation relies on GRAVES and DORIS data. We found that the gain in terms of evaluated radial velocity can be as high as 1.76κ, where κ is the typical root mean square of the noise on radial velocity measurements for GRAVES (excluding ionospheric effects): the error decreases from 2.60κ to 0.83κ for daytime satellite overhead passes. Our conclusion is that, while this method is very simple to implement, it has proven to be a good correction for ionospheric effects in practice.