Identification

Title

Towards cooperative global mapping of the ionosphere: Fusion feasibility for IGS and IRI with global climate VTEC maps

Abstract

Recommendations of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) Workshop 2017 in Taoyuan City, Taiwan and International GNSS Service (IGS) Workshop 2018 in Wuhan, China included establishment of an ionosphere mapping service that would fuse measurements from two independent sensor networks: IGS permanent GNSS receivers providing the vertical total electron content (VTEC) measurements and ionosondes of the Global Ionosphere Radio Observatory (GIRO) that compute the bottomside vertical profiles of the ionospheric plasma density. Using available GAMBIT software at GIRO, we introduced new VTEC products to its data roster: previously unavailable global average (climate) maps of VTEC and slab thickness based on climatological capabilities of IRI. Incorporation of the VTEC and tau maps into the GAMBIT Explorer environment provided data analysts with nearly 10-year history of the reference average VTEC records and opened access to the GAMBIT toolkit for evaluation and validation of the tau computations. This result is the first step towards establishing an infrastructure and the data workflow to provide GAMBIT users with the low latency and consistent quality and usability of the ionospheric weather-climate specifications. Combination of IGS-provided VTEC and GIRO-provided peak density of F2 layer NmF2 allows ground-based evaluation of the equivalent slab thickness tau, a derived property of the near-Earth plasma that characterizes the skewness of its vertical profile up to the GNSS spacecraft altitudes.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7mp56s9

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2020-10-28T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact