Modeling of local ionospheric time varying characteristics based on singular value decomposition over low-latitude GPS stations

Abstract

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) model is implemented to recognize the Total Electron Content (TEC) time series of daily, temporal as well as seasonal characteristics throughout the 24th solar cycle period of the year 2015 in the study. The Vertical (vTEC) analysis has been carried out with Global Positioning System (GPS) data sets collected from five stations from India namely GNT, Guntur (16.44∘ N, 80.62∘ E), and IISC, Bangalore (12.97∘ N, 77.59∘ E), LCK2, Lucknow (26.76∘ N, 80.88∘ E), one station from Thailand namely AITB, Bangkok (14.07∘ N, 100.61∘ E), and one station from South Andaman Island namely PBR, Port Blair (11.43∘ N, 92.43∘ E), located in low latitude region. The first five singular value modes constitute about 98% of the total variance, which are linearly transformed from the observed TEC data sets. So it is viable to decrease the number of modeling parameters. The Fourier Series Analysis (FSA) is carried out to characterize the solar-cycle, annual and semi-annual dependences through modulating the first three singular values by the solar (F10.7) and geomagnetic (Ap) indices. The positive correlation coefficient (0.75) of daily averaged GPS–TEC with daily averaged F10.7 strongly supports the temporal variations of the ionospheric features depends on the solar activity. Further, the significance and reliability of the SVD model is evaluated by comparing it with GPS–TEC data and the standard global model (Standard Plasma-Spherical Ionospheric Model, SPIM and International Reference Ionosphere, IRI 2016).