Towards cooperative global mapping of the ionosphere: fusion feasibility for igs and iri with global climate vtec maps

Recommendations of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) Workshop 2017 in Taoyuan City, Taiwan and International GNSS Service (IGS) Workshop 2018 in Wuhan, China included establishment of an ionosphere mapping service that would fuse measurements from two independent sensor networks: IGS perm...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Fron, Adam, Krankowski, Andrzej, Galkin, Ivan, Bilitza, D., Hernández Pajares, Manuel|||0000-0002-9687-5850, Reinisch, Bodo W., Li, Zishen, Kotulak, Kacper, Zakharenkova, I., Cherniak, Iurii, Roma Dollase, David|||0000-0003-4450-6073, Wang, Ningbo, Flisek, Pawel, García Rigo, Alberto|||0000-0001-6226-4851
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/340813
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/340813
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rs12213531
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Astronomy and astrophysics
IGS
GIRO
IRI
ionosphere
VTEC
NmF2
slab thickness
Astrofísica
Classificació AMS::85 Astronomy and astrophysics
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Matemàtiques i estadística::Matemàtica aplicada a les ciències
Descripción
Sumario:Recommendations of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) Workshop 2017 in Taoyuan City, Taiwan and International GNSS Service (IGS) Workshop 2018 in Wuhan, China included establishment of an ionosphere mapping service that would fuse measurements from two independent sensor networks: IGS permanent GNSS receivers providing the vertical total electron content (VTEC) measurements and ionosondes of the Global Ionosphere Radio Observatory (GIRO) that compute the bottomside vertical profiles of the ionospheric plasma density. Using available GAMBIT software at GIRO, we introduced new VTEC products to its data roster: previously unavailable global average (climate) maps of VTEC and slab thickness based on climatological capabilities of IRI. Incorporation of the VTEC and t maps into the GAMBIT Explorer environment provided data analysts with nearly 10-year history of the reference average VTEC records and opened access to the GAMBIT toolkit for evaluation and validation of the t computations. This result is the first step towards establishing an infrastructure and the data workflow to provide GAMBIT users with the low latency and consistent quality and usability of the ionospheric weather-climate specifications. Combination of IGS-provided VTEC and GIRO-provided peak density of F2 layer NmF2 allows ground-based evaluation of the equivalent slab thickness t, a derived property of the near-Earth plasma that characterizes the skewness of its vertical profile up to the GNSS spacecraft altitudes.