IonKit-NH: a MATLAB-based toolkit for ionospheric detection of natural hazard

Abstract

In recent years, ionospheric sounding by GNSS total electron content (TEC) has been a powerful tool to detect the natural hazard such as earthquake, tsunami and volcanic eruption due to the fact that the natural hazard-produced acoustic waves or gravity waves can travel into the ionosphere and trigger travelling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs).However, open-source program on this field is scarce. Here, we developed a MATLAB-based toolkit, called IonKit-NH, to detection of natural hazard. IonKit-NH is capable of processing multi-system GNSS including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BDS and forming different dual-frequency combinations to solve TEC. Based on the GNSS TEC, IonKit-NH generates the time-distance map and two-dimensional map of TEC variation, which can be used to obtain the characteristics of TIDs induced by natural hazard.