Ionosonde Total Electron Content Evaluation Using IGS Data

Abstract. In this work, a period of two years (2016–2017) of vertical total electron content (VTEC) from ionosondes operating in Brazil is compared to the International GNSS Service (IGS) data. Sounding instruments from National Institute for Space Research (INPE) provided the ionograms used, which were filtered based on confidence score (CS) and C-level flags evaluation. Differences between TEC from IGS maps and ionograms were accumulated in terms of root mean square error (RMSE). It has been noticed the TEC values provided by ionograms are systematically underestimated, which is attributed to a limitation in the electron density modeled for the ionogram topside that considers maximum height only around 800–900 Km, while IGS takes in account electron density from GNSS stations up to the satellite network orbits. The ionogram topside profiles covering the plasmasphere were re-modeled using an adaptive alpha-Chapman exponential decay that includes a transition function between the F2 layer and plasmasphere, and electron density integration height was extended to compute TEC. Chapman parameters for the F2 layer were extracted from each ionogram, and plasmaspheric scale height was set to 10,000 Km. Our analysis has shown the plasmaspheric basis electron density, assumed to be proportional to the electron peak density, plays an important role to reduce the RMSE values. Depending on the proportionality coefficient choice, mean RMSE reached a minimum of 5.32 TECU, that is 23 % lower than initial ionograms TEC errors.