MITIGATOR: GNSS-Based System for Remote Sensing of Ionospheric Absolute Total Electron Content

Abstract

Monitoring the Earth’s ionosphere is an important, fundamental and applied problem. Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) provide a way of measuring the ionospheric total electron content (TEC), but real-time single-station absolute TEC measurements are still a problem. This study describes a single-station system to measure the absolute TEC, based on the GNSS – MITIGATOR (MonITorInG the Absolute TOtal electRon content) system. The latter enables real-time measurements for the absolute TEC and its derivatives in time and in space to be obtained. The system is implemented by using JAVAD receivers. The convergence time and the run-mode retention time is ~8 h. We provide potential methods for using the system to estimate the critical frequency of the ionosphere, foF2, at oblique paths in the Siberian region. The developed tool could be useful for supporting real-time multi-instrumental ionosphere monitoring or for compensating for the ionospheric errors of radio equipment.

A simple ionospheric correction method for radar-based space surveillance systems, with performance assessment on GRAVES data

“…A review of the techniques for modeling the total electron content of the ionosphere can be found in Bust & Mitchell (2008). New developments are still ongoing (see for example Bidaine & Warnant (2010); Ansari et al (2017); Li et al (2020b); Yasyukevich et al (2015Yasyukevich et al ( , 2020Yasyukevich et al ( , 2022; Li et al (2021); Pudlovskiy (2021)); notably machine learning techniques have developed in this field like many others (Orus Perez, 2019;Mallika I et al, 2020;Ferreira et al, 2017). Typical examples of tomography reconstruction algorithm of the ionosphere in the literature, such as Seemala et al (2014), model the TEC over wide timescales (more than an hour, possibly more than a half day) and wide geographical regions (with cells hundreds of kilometers wide).…”