Characterization of ionospheric variability in TEC using EOF and wavelets over low-latitude GNSS stations

Abstract

Investigation of ionospheric variability is essential for improving the daily ionospheric modeling and forecasting services of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) applications. As India is a low-latitude region, more care has to be taken here to characterize the ionosphere due to irregularities and Equatorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA) conditions. Therefore, an appropriate method is required to diagnose the ionospheric variations during geomagnetic, solar and other disturbances. In this paper, the temporal ionospheric time delay variations were studied based on the Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis and wavelet transforms (WT).These analyses were carried out with Total Electron Content (TEC) datasets obtained from three GNSS stations located in low-latitude regions. EOF analysis was performed on the TEC datasets, which were decomposed into a time series of orthogonal eigen values (or base functions) and associated coefficients. EOF base functions and their associated coefficients signify the hourly time variations and the day of the year variations. The results reveal that the first few EOFs represented the majority of TEC variability pertaining to the physical processes of the ionosphere. The accuracy of the EOF model was validated by the evaluation of observational TEC data with International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) 2012 models. The EOF model coefficients for each GNSS station showed a strong correlation with the IRI models and also described the correlation between the impacts of the level of geomagnetic activity on the ionosphere. The correlation coefficients for the first three EOFs were more than 0.95. The phase relationship of ionospheric TEC anomalies, with respect to the geomagnetic indices (Dst), were analyzed by wavelet transforms.