Abstract
Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is a well-established sensors in the recent ionosphere research. By comparing with classical meteorological equipments, the GNSS application can obtain more reliable and precious ionospheric total electron content (TEC) result. However, the most used GNSS ionospheric tomography technique is sensitive to a priori information due to the sparse and non-uniform distribution of GNSS stations. In this paper, we propose an improved method based on adaptive Laplacian smoothing and algebraic reconstruction technique (ALS-ART). Compared with traditional constant constraints, this method is less dependent on a priori information and adaptive smoothing constraints is closer to the actual situation. Tomography experiments using simulated data show that reconstruction accuracy of ionospheric electron density using ALS-ART method is significantly improved. We also use the method to do the analysis of real observation data and compare the tomography results with ionosonde observation data. The results demonstrate the superiority and reliability of the proposed method compared to traditional constant constraints method which will further improve the capability of obtaining precious ionosphere TEC by using GNSS.
Highlights
The ionosphere is an ionized region of the Earth’s atmosphere, which is generally accepted that begins at 50 km and ends at 1000 km approximately from the Earth surface
The slant total electron content (TEC) data are used as computerized ionospheric tomography (CIT) projections in a region [34], which along the ray path of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signal between a satellite and a ground receiver is defined as the integrated value of the ionospheric electron density (IED) and is modeled as STECðtÞ 1⁄4 Neðr; tÞds ði 1⁄4 1; ; I; j 1⁄4 1; ; JÞ
GNSS observations from the international GNSS service (IGS) stations in Europe are used in the experiments and consist of simulated observations and real measurements
Summary
The ionosphere is an ionized region of the Earth’s atmosphere, which is generally accepted that begins at 50 km and ends at 1000 km approximately from the Earth surface. These existing studies have overcome the ill-posedness of ionospheric electron density reconstruction based on constraints and priori information, especially in vertical structure of the ionosphere. These studies have shown that the results of CIT could strongly depend on constraints and prior information. To reduce the dependence on the prior information and reconstruct a higher precision ionospheric vertical structure, we propose a novel approach using adaptive Laplacian smoothing and algebraic reconstruction technique (ALS-ART) for three-dimensional GNSS ionospheric tomography.
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