Medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances by three-dimensional ionospheric GPS tomography

Abstract

In this study, we develop a three-dimensional ionospheric tomography with the ground-based global position system (GPS) total electron content observations. Because of the geometric limitation of GPS observation path, it is difficult to solve the ill-posed inverse problem for the ionospheric electron density. Different from methods given by pervious studies, we consider an algorithm combining the least-square method with a constraint condition, in which the gradient of electron density tends to be smooth in the horizontal direction and steep in the vicinity of the ionospheric F2 peak. This algorithm is designed to be independent of any ionospheric or plasmaspheric electron density models as the initial condition. An observation system simulation experiment method is applied to evaluate the performance of the GPS ionospheric tomography in detecting ionospheric electron density perturbation at the scale size of around 200 km in wavelength, such as the medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances.

Real-Time Ionosphere Monitoring by Three-Dimensional Tomography over Japan

“…There are different algorithms available for ionospheric tomography, e.g., the Algebraic Reconstruction Technique or the Bayesian statistical approach . Our three‐dimensional tomography is based on a constrained least squares method with optimized constraining parameters . The advantage of this method is that it does not rely on any initial guesses.…”

“…Recently, several studies have attempted three‐dimensional ionospheric tomography with GEONET data . The ionospheric tomography technique has evolved in reconstructing three‐dimensional ionospheric density distributions using a constrained least squares method with optimized constraining parameters . The objective of this study was to develop a real‐time three‐dimensional ionospheric density monitoring system using a tomography technique and data from widely distributed GNSS reference stations.…”

On the short-term temporal variations of GNSS receiver differential phase biases

“…thin-layer or tomographic) (Brunini and Azpilicueta 2010;Chen et al 2016;Debao et al 2015;Yao et al 2013). We remark here that the satellite and receiver DCB combined may attain a maximum magnitude of 100 total electron content units (TECu) (Ciraolo et al 2007; Yunbin et al 2015), thus deserving a careful treatment.…”

Real-time Ionosphere Monitoring by Three-dimensional Tomography Over Japan

“…There are different algorithms available for ionospheric tomography, e.g., the Algebraic Reconstruction Technique [2,10] or the Bayesian statistical approach [3,11]. Our three-dimensional tomography is based on a constrained least squares method with optimized constraining parameters [6,8]. The advantage of this method is that it does not rely on any initial guesses.…”

“…Recently, several studies have attempted threedimensional ionospheric tomography with GEONET data [6][7][8]. The ionospheric tomography technique has evolved in reconstructing three-dimensional ionospheric density distributions using a constrained least squares method with optimized constraining parameters [6,8]. The objective of this study was to develop a real-time three-dimensional ionospheric density monitoring system using a tomography technique and data from widely distributed GNSS reference stations.…”