Using tomography of GPS TEC to routinely determine ionospheric average electron density profiles

Abstract

This paper introduces a technique that calculates average electron density ( N e) profiles over a wide geographic area of coverage, using tomographic ionospheric N e profiles. These N e profiles, which can provide information of the N e distribution up to global positioning system (GPS) orbiting altitude (with the coordination of space-based GPS tomographic profiles), can be incorporated into the next generation of the international reference ionosphere (IRI) model. An additional advantage of tomography is that it enables accurate modeling of the topside ionosphere. By applying the tomographic reconstruction approach to ground-based GPS slant total electron content (STEC), we calculate 3-h average N e profiles over a wide region. Since it uses real measurement data, tomographic average N e profiles describe the ionosphere during quiet and disturbed periods. The computed average N e profiles are compared with IRI model profiles and average N e profiles obtained from ground-based ionosondes.