Abstract
An accurate forecast of the atmospheric Total Electron Content (TEC) is helpful to investigate space weather influences on the ionosphere and technical applications like satellite-receiver radio links. The purpose of this work is to compare four empirical methods for a 24-h forecast of vertical TEC maps over Europe under geomagnetically quiet conditions.TEC map data are obtained from the Space Weather Application Center Ionosphere (SWACI) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). The time-series methods Standard Persistence Model (SPM), a 27 day median model (MediMod) and a Fourier Series Expansion are compared to maps for the entire year of 2015. As a representative of the climatological coefficient models the forecast performance of the Global Neustrelitz TEC model (NTCM-GL) is also investigated. Time periods of magnetic storms, which are identified with the Dst index, are excluded from the validation.By calculating the TEC values with the most recent maps, the time-series methods perform slightly better than the coefficient model NTCM-GL. The benefit of NTCM-GL is its independence on observational TEC data. Amongst the time-series methods mentioned, MediMod delivers the best overall performance regarding accuracy and data gap handling. Quiet-time SWACI maps can be forecasted accurately and in real-time by the MediMod time-series approach.
Highlights
Predicting the state of the ionosphere is a topic of increasing technical and economic interest
We divide our investigation into four different geographic latitudes: 30°N, 40°N, 50°N and 60°N with a constant value of 15°E for Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) maps and 16°E for Space Weather Application Center Ionosphere (SWACI) maps
We deliver a statistical comparison of four empirical approaches for a 24-h quiet-time Total Electron Content (TEC) map forecast of European SWACI and UPC maps
Summary
Predicting the state of the ionosphere is a topic of increasing technical and economic interest. The highest atmospheric electron density can be found in this environment, which reaches from approximately 75 km over the Earth’s surface up to around 1000 km. The electrons can strongly influence several technical devices and applications. Solar storm influences on the ionosphere can be investigated by comparing measurements to quiet-time forecasts. An accurate near real-time (NRT) forecast of 24 h in advance is necessary to inform users of communication and navigation tools about the ionospheric state. This is to be developed and included into the Neustrelitz Ionospheric Monitoring and Prediction Center (IMPC) (Berdermann et al, 2014)
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Published Version
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