The new AIS-INGV digital ionosonde

Abstract

A new digital ionosonde called AIS-INGV (Advanced Ionospheric Sounder) was designed both for research and for routine service of HF radio wave propagation forecast. Nearly the entire system was developed in the Laboratorio di Geofi sica Ambientale at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofi sica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome. It exploits advanced techniques for signal analysis, recent technological devices and PC resources. This paper describes design concepts and performance of the new ionosonde.

A spectral study of the mid-latitude sporadic E layer characteristic oscillations comparable to those of the tidal and the planetary waves

“…The ionograms used to make the ftEs and h′Es time series employed in this study were recorded during a summertime campaign (4 June-30 September 2013) by the Advanced Ionospheric Sounder-Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (AIS-INGV) ionosondes (Zuccheretti et al, 2003) installed at Rome (Italy, 41.8°N, 12.5°E) and Gibilmanna (Italy, 37.9°N, 14.0°E), with a sounding repetition rate of 5 and 15 min respectively. The corresponding sweeping frequency range was set up from 1 MHz to 16 MHz at both stations, with a frequency resolution of 0.05 MHz; the height range investigated by the AIS-INGV ionosonde is 90-760.5 km with a height resolution of 4.5 km, these two altitude settings being fixed and depending on the architectural features of the ionosonde.…”

A comparative study of ionospheric IRIEup and ISP assimilative models during some intense and severe geomagnetic storms

“…3-D electron density matrices are obtained also after assimilating autoscaled electron density profiles. Specifically, the Adaptive Ionospheric Profiler (AIP) (Scotto, 2009;Scotto et al, 2012), an integral part of AUTOSCALA (Scotto andPezzopane, 2002, 2008;Scotto, 2005, 2007), was applied to get measured electron density profiles from the ionograms recorded by the AIS-INGV ionosonde (Zuccheretti et al, 2003) at Rome and Gibilmanna, and also from the ionograms recorded by the VISRC2 ionosonde in Warsaw; electron density profiles measured in the other stations were instead obtained applying the ARTIST system on the ionograms recorded by the DPS4 Digisonde (Reinisch et al, 2009), which reconstructs the ionospheric bottom side profile according to the technique developed by Reinisch and Huang (1983), and gives also an estimation of the ionospheric topside profile which relies on the F2layer peak characteristics (Reinisch and Huang, 2001). Electron density profiles autoscaled in Rome and Gibilmanna were downloaded through the electronic Space Weather upper atmosphere database (eSWua) (http:// www.eswua.ingv.it/, Romano et al, 2008).…”

On the solar cycle dependence of the amplitude modulation characterizing the mid-latitude sporadic E layer diurnal periodicity

“…The foEs values were all validated from traces recorded by classical ionosondes, which cannot tag the different polarization characterizing the two different modes of propagation of the electromagnetic wave. A VOS-1 chirp ionosonde produced by the Barry Research Corporation, Palo Alto, CA, USA (Barry Research Corporation, 1975) sounded from January 1976 to November 2004, and then it was replaced by an AIS-INGV ionosonde (Zuccheretti et al, 2003), for which the ionograms were validated by using the Interpre software (Pezzopane, 2004). This means that the foEs validated time series considered in this study represent a reliable and homogeneous data set.…”