Abstract

Abstract. In this work, a period of 2 years (2016–2017) of ionospheric total electron content (ITEC) from ionosondes operating in Brazil is compared to the International GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) Service (IGS) vertical total electron content (vTEC) data. Sounding instruments from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) provided the ionograms used, which were filtered based on confidence score (CS) and C-Level flag evaluation. Differences between vTEC from IGS maps and ionosonde TEC were accumulated in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE). As expected, we noticed that the ITEC values provided by ionosondes are systematically underestimated, which is attributed to a limitation in the electron density modeling for the ionogram topside that considers a fixed scale height, which makes density values decay too rapidly above ∼800 km, while IGS takes in account electron density from GNSS stations up to the satellite network orbits. The topside density profiles covering the plasmasphere were re-modeled using two different approaches: an optimization of the adapted α-Chapman exponential decay that includes a transition function between the F2 layer and plasmasphere and a corrected version of the NeQuick topside formulation. The electron density integration height was extended to 20 000 km to compute TEC. Chapman parameters for the F2 layer were extracted from each ionogram, and the plasmaspheric scale height was set to 10 000 km. A criterion to optimize the proportionality coefficient used to calculate the plasmaspheric basis density was introduced in this work. The NeQuick variable scale height was calculated using empirical parameters determined with data from Swarm satellites. The mean RMSE for the whole period using adapted α-Chapman optimization reached a minimum of 5.32 TECU, that is, 23 % lower than initial ITEC errors, while for the NeQuick topside formulation the error was reduced by 27 %.

Highlights

  • The understanding of ionospheric behavior provides important information about the space weather

  • The analysis proposed in this work is based on comparisons between total electron content (TEC) estimated using density profiles derived from ionograms and vertical total electron content from the International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service (IGS)

  • This paper presented a 2-year period validation of ionosonde data, using IGS vertical total electron content (vTEC) as a reference

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Summary

Introduction

The understanding of ionospheric behavior provides important information about the space weather. The electron content affects group and phase delays of radio waves passing through the ionosphere and impacts, among others, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). While ionosonde instruments provide “ground truth” measures for the bottom side of the ionospheric profile and estimate the topside using an exponential decay function, ground GNSS stations receiving radio signals from orbiting satellites can provide largescale details of the entire ionosphere structure and even plasmasphere (Huang and Reinisch, 2001; Reinisch and Huang, 2001; Jakowski, 2005; Reinisch and Galkin, 2011; Jin and Jin, 2011). S. Klipp et al.: Ionosonde total electron content evaluation using IGS data control through a ranking system (Hernández-Pajares et al, 2009), ionosonde data are evaluated by its auto-scaling system, and quality scores are assigned to each ionogram. The plasmaspheric electron density has been considered using two different models: an adapted α-Chapman function (Jakowski, 2005) with a simple optimization and a corrected version of the NeQuick topside formulation (Pezzopane and Pignalberi, 2019)

IGS vTEC maps
Ionosonde data
Methodology
Experiments and results
Adapted α-Chapman
NeQuick topside formulation
Comparative evaluation
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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