UNCLASSIFIED/UNLIMITED UNCLASSIFIED/UNLIMITED Polar Ionospheric Imaging at Storm Time

During periods of major geomagnetic storms the polar ionosphere becomes very variable. Ground-based measurements, such as NIMS, GPS or ionosonde data are too sparse to do tomographic imaging, however, combination of these data sources as well as other available measurements, such as satellite-based...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ms Ping Yin, Dr Cathryn Mitchell
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.528.3728
http://ftp.rta.nato.int/public//pubfulltext/rto/mp/rto-mp-ist-056///mp-ist-056-03.pdf
Description
Summary:During periods of major geomagnetic storms the polar ionosphere becomes very variable. Ground-based measurements, such as NIMS, GPS or ionosonde data are too sparse to do tomographic imaging, however, combination of these data sources as well as other available measurements, such as satellite-based data, may have the possibility to monitor the structure of the disturbed polar ionosphere. In this paper, LEO-based GPS data onboard CHAMP as well as ground-based GPS and ionosonde observations are input into a four dimensional tomographic algorithm – MIDAS (Multi-Instrument Data Analysis System) to image the disturbed ionosphere at Alaska and Greenland as well as over Europe for the major storm in October 2003. In contrast, electron density images produced by another independent method – IDA3D (Ionospheric Data Assimilation Three Dimensional), which assimilates primarily NIMS data and other data source, are involved to perform comparisons. A general good agreement can be obtained between them. As a result, the addition of LEO-based GPS data presents a great potential in polar ionospheric imaging. Tomographic imaging is an established method to study the ionosphere [for example see 1, 2]. Because