Imaging of the equatorial ionosphere

Abstract

The equatorial anomaly is the dominant structure in free electron concentration in the tropical ionosphere. Due to its edges (crests) which are characterised by steep latitudinal gradients in TEC and are temporally and spatially variable, it is one of the ionospheric regions most difficult to image with inversion methods. In this paper we reconstruct an International Reference Ionosphere model of the equatorial ionosphere by employing a grid of virtual ground GPS receivers and actual GPS satellite positions. The MIDAS algorithm, an inversion method for reconstructing the ionosphere as a linear composition of given empirical orthogonal functions, is used. Comparing the true model ionosphere with the resulting images a fine tuning of the basis functions (vertical profile contraints) in the inversion is realised.