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An improved constrained simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique for ionospheric tomography

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Abstract

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is now widely used for continuous ionospheric observations. Three-dimensional computerized ionospheric tomography (3DCIT) is an important tool for the reconstruction of electron density distributions in the ionosphere through effective use of the GNSS data. More specifically, the 3DCIT technique is able to resolve the three-dimensional electron density distributions over the reconstructed area based on the GNSS slant total electron content (STEC) observations. We present an Improved Constrained Simultaneous Iterative Reconstruction Technique (ICSIRT) algorithm that differs from the traditional ionospheric tomography methods in 3 ways. First, the ICSIRT computes the electron density corrections based on the product of the intercept and electron density within voxels so that the assignment of corrections at different heights becomes more reasonable. Second, an Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) interpolation is used to restrict the electron density values in the voxels not traversed by GNSS rays, thereby ensuring the smoothness of the reconstructed region. Also, to improve the reconstruction accuracy around the HmF2 (the peak height of the F2 layer) altitude, a multiresolution grid is adopted in the vertical direction, with a 10-km resolution from 200 to 420 km and a 50-km resolution at other altitudes. The new algorithm has been applied to the GNSS data over the European and North American regions in different case studies that involve different seasonal conditions as well as a major storm. In the European region experiment, reconstruction results show that the new ICSIRT algorithm can effectively improve the reconstruction of the GNSS data. The electron density profiles retrieved from ICSIRT are much closer to the ionosonde observations than those from its predecessor, namely, the Constrained Simultaneous Iteration Reconstruction Technique (CSIRT). The reconstruction accuracy is significantly improved. In the North American region experiment, the electron density profiles in ICSIRT results show better agreement with incoherent scatter radar observations than CSIRT, even for the topside profiles.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank EUREF Permanent GNSS Network (EPN) for providing the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data and Global Ionospheric Radio Observatory (GIRO) for providing the ionosonde data. We acknowledge Telecommunications/ICT for Development (T/ICT4D) Laboratory of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy, for providing NeQuick2 model. The GNSS data are obtained from ftp://epncb.oma.be/, and the ionosonde data are obtained from ftp://ngdc.noaa.gov/ionosonde/data/. We also thank MIT Haystack Observatory for providing incoherent scatter radar data. Millstone Hill ISR data can be download from http://cedar.openmadrigal.org. Radar observations and analysis at Millstone Hill and the Madrigal distributed database system are supported by the US National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement AGS-1762141 with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research was supported by (1) National Natural Science Foundation Innovation Research Group Project (Grant NO. 41721003); (2) National Natural Fund of China (41604002) Open Research Fund of State Key; (3) Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University (18P02); (4) Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment and Geodesy, Ministry of Education, Wuhan University (170208)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Yibin Yao, Changzhi Zhai, Cunjie Zhao, Yiyong Luo & Lei Liu

  2. Chinese Antarctic Center of Surveying and Mapping, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Jian Kong

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  1. Yibin Yao
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  2. Changzhi Zhai
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  3. Jian Kong
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  4. Cunjie Zhao
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  5. Yiyong Luo
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Correspondence to Changzhi Zhai or Jian Kong.

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Yao, Y., Zhai, C., Kong, J. et al. An improved constrained simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique for ionospheric tomography. GPS Solut 24, 68 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-020-00981-4

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