Adjustments of the TaD electron density reconstruction model with GNSS-TEC parameters for operational application purposes

¹ National Institute of Geophysics, Geodesy, and Geography, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
² Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
³ Institute of Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing, National Observatory of Athens, 15236 Palaia Penteli, Greece

^* corresponding author: e-mail: belehaki@noa.gr

Received: 19 June 2012
Accepted: 23 November 2012

Abstract

Validation results on the latest version of TaD model (TaDv2) show realistic reconstruction of the electron density profiles (EDPs) with an average error of 3 TECU, similar to the error obtained from GNSS-TEC calculated paremeters. The work presented here has the aim to further improve the accuracy of the TaD topside reconstruction, adjusting the TEC parameter calculated from TaD model with the TEC parameter calculated by GNSS transmitting RINEX files provided by receivers co-located with the Digisondes. The performance of the new version is tested during a storm period demonstrating further improvements in respect to the previous version. Statistical comparison of modeled and observed TEC confirms the validity of the proposed adjustment. A significant benefit of the proposed upgrade is that it facilitates the real-time implementation of TaD. The model needs a reliable measure of the scale height at the peak height, which is supposed to be provided by Digisondes. Oftenly, the automatic scaling software fails to correctly calculate the scale height at the peak, H_m, due to interferences in the receiving signal. Consequently the model estimated topside scale height is wrongly calculated leading to unrealistic results for the modeled EDP. The proposed TEC adjustment forces the model to correctly reproduce the topside scale height, despite the inaccurate values of H_m. This adjustment is very important for the application of TaD in an operational environment.