Regional Ionosphere Mapping with Kriging and Multiquadric Methods

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the concept and practical examples of instantaneous mapping of regional ionosphere, based on GPS observations from the State of Ohio continuously operating reference stations (CORS) network. Interpolation/prediction techniques, such as kriging (KR) and the Multiquadric Model (MQ), which are suitable for handling multi-scale phenomena and unevenly distributed data, were used to create total electron content (TEC) maps. Their computational efficiency (especially the MQ technique) and the ability to handle undersampled data (especially kriging) are particularly attractive. Presented here are the preliminary results based on GPS observations collected at five Ohio CORS stations (~100 km sta-tion separation and 1-second sampling rate). Dual frequency carrier phase and code GPS observations were used. A zero-difference approach was used for absolute TEC recovery. The quality of the ionosphere rep-resentation was tested by comparison to the International GPS Service (IGS) Global Ionosphere Maps (GIMs), which were used as a reference.