High-resolution and high-accuracy global ionosphere maps estimated by GNSS and LEO constellations: simulative and real data experimental results

Global ionospheric total electron content (TEC) map has been employed in many high-precision areas. However, its spatial and temporal resolution is not ideal since the ground-based Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) stations distributed unevenly. Fortunately, many low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations will provide a large number of observations that can be used for ionospheric monitoring in the future. In this contribution, we presented two methods, which are the single-layer normalization (SLN) method and the dual-layer superposition (DLS) method, for ionospheric modeling based on the simulative and real data of GNSS+LEO satellites.

For simulative data, a constellation with 192 LEO satellites is simulated. And then,  the global ionospheric maps (GIMs) are estimated by all Multi-GNSS and simulative LEO satellite observations. The results showed that the root mean square (RMS) is reduced by approximately 25% and 21% for SLN method and DLS method, respectively. For real data,  20 available scientific LEO satellites, such as Jason-2/3, COSMIC-1/-2, Swarm missions, etc.,  are employed in the ground-based GNSS ionospheric modeling. The results showed that the differences between the ionospheric model estimated by GNSS+LEO and that by GNSS data are mainly over the oceanic region, which may exceed ±20 TECU. The improvement of RMS over the oceanic region is about 15% for the ionospheric model estimated by GNSS+LEO. The RMS of the ionospheric model improved approximately 4.0% compared with that by GNSS data using the dSTEC assessment method.