Improving Total Electron Content (TEC) Models for Geodetic Applications

Increasing the quality of ionosphere modeling is crucial and remains a challenge for many geodetic applications such as GNSS Precise Point Positioning (PPP) and navigation. Ionosphere models are the main tool to provide an estimation of Total Electron Content (TEC) to be corrected from GNSS career phase and pseudorange measurements. Skills of these models are however limited due to the simplifications in model equations and the imperfect knowledge of model parameters. In this study, an ionosphere reconstruction approach is presented, where global estimations of geodetic-based TEC measurements are combined with an ionospheric background model. This is achieved here through a novel simultaneous Calibration and Data Assimilation (C/DA) technique that works based on the sequential Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF). The C/DA method ingests the actual ionospheric measurements (derived from global GNSS measurements) into the IRI (International Reference Ionosphere) model. It also calibrates those parameters that control the F2 layer’s characteristics such as selected important CCIR (Comité Consultatif International des Radiocommunicationsand) URSI (International Union of Radio Science) coefficients.  The calibrated parameters derived from the C/DA are then replaced in the IRI to simulate TEC values in locations, where less GNSS ground-station infrastructure exists, as well as to enhance the prediction of TEC when the observations are not available or their usage is cautious due to low quality. Our numerical assessments indicate the advantage of the C/DA to improve the IRI’s performance. Values of the TEC-Root Mean Square of Error (RMSE) are found to be decreased by up to 30% globally, compared to the original IRI simulations. The importance of the new TEC estimations is demonstrated for PPP applications, whose results show improvements in navigation applications.

Keywords: Ionosphere, Calibration and Data Assimilation (C/DA), IRI, Total Electron Content (TEC), Precise Point Positioning (PPP), GNSS