Deriving Ionospheric Sporadic E Intensity From FORMOSAT‐3/COSMIC and FY‐3C Radio Occultation Measurements

Abstract

The total electron content (TEC) profiles from the FORMOsa SATellite mission‐3/Constellation Observing System for the Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) and the Fengyun‐3C (FY‐3C) radio occultation (RO) missions during 2006 and 2019 are used to establish the models for deriving the ionospheric sporadic E (Es) critical frequency (foEs). Smax is derived as the maximum vertical gradient of TEC disturbance, which is extracted from a RO TEC profile using the singular spectrum analysis method. Three candidate conversion models are obtained by fitting Smax with foEs observed by collocated ionosondes, and the one with the best performance, the COSMIC&FY‐3C (CF) model, is applied for deriving foEs (foEsCF) from the TEC data of the two missions jointly. For comparison, the C model, which is of similar form as the CF model while being established without using the FY‐3C data, is applied for deriving foEs (foEsC) from the COSMIC TEC data only. The validations over four independent ionosonde stations demonstrate that mean improvements of 0.11 MHz (32%) in the absolute bias and 0.24 MHz (17%) in the root mean square error are obtained by foEsCF compared with foEsC. The spatiotemporal distributions of Es intensity during 2015 and 2019, presented respectively by foEsCF and foEsC, are further compared. The CF model provides more abundant and more detailed information about Es intensity distribution, which is most distinct at high latitudes where the contribution of FY‐3C RO TEC data is significant. Our results reveal that with the aging of the COSMIC satellites, FY‐3C TEC data is a valuable supplementary RO data source for Es‐related studies.

Detection and Classification of Sporadic E Using Convolutional Neural Networks

“…Similarly, in plot (d), we see E s intensity peaking in the austral summer (December-February) and reaching its minimum in winter (June-August). Although in the Southern Hemisphere, the intensities do not get quite as high as the Northern Hemisphere, which has also been noticed in Hu et al (2022) and Niu et al (2019). Both the solar driven diurnal behavior and maximum intensity during summer months of the respective hemisphere agree with results reported in literature (Hodos et al, 2022;Yu et al, 2022).…”

“…Although in the Southern Hemisphere, the intensities do not get quite as high as the Northern Hemisphere, which has also been noticed in Hu et al. (2022) and Niu et al. (2019).…”

“…In the remaining sections, the method from Yu et al (2020) will be referred to as S 4, max , the method from Gooch et al (2019) as TEC, and the method from Hu et al (2022) as S max .…”

“…In addition to analyzing the ML models, it is useful to compare the models with others found in literature. For this comparison, we use the methods from Yu et al (2020), Gooch et al (2019), andHu et al (2022) to make predictions using the same testing set as the CNN models.…”

“…Over the years, sporadic E has been measured and monitored using a variety of different instrumentation and methods. This list includes sounding rockets (Hall et al., 1971; Mori & Oyama, 1998; Yamamoto et al., 1998), incoherent scatter radars (ISR) (Christakis et al., 2009; Mathews, 1998), ionosondes (Haldoupis et al., 2006; Merriman et al., 2021; Oikonomou et al., 2014), and GNSS radio occultations (RO) (Arras & Wickert, 2018; Arras et al., 2008; Chu et al., 2014; Gooch et al., 2019; Hocke et al., 2001; Hu et al., 2022; Wu et al., 2005; Zeng & Sokolovskiy, 2010). While sounding rockets are able to provide accurate in situ measurements, they are generally carried out in campaigns which limited spatial and temporal coverage.…”