A new way of improving global ionospheric maps by ionospheric tomography: consistent combination of multi-GNSS and multi-space geodetic dual-frequency measurements gathered from vessel-, LEO- and ground-based receivers | Journal of Geodesy Skip to main content
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A new way of improving global ionospheric maps by ionospheric tomography: consistent combination of multi-GNSS and multi-space geodetic dual-frequency measurements gathered from vessel-, LEO- and ground-based receivers

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Abstract

In this work, we introduce a new way of improving the sligthly best performing global ionospheric model (GIM) within the International GNSS Service, the UQRG produced by UPC-IonSAT with the TOMION dual-layer voxel model solved with ground-based dual-frequency carrier phase GPS data combined with kriging interpolation. This is done by increasing its vertical resolution consistently with the heights of the now involved GNSS and DORIS LEO receivers. This has allowed the synergestic combination of vessel-, LEO- and ground-based measurements, providing an increase of the VTEC accuracy at global scale in large regions with sparse GPS ground-based data. The performance of the new resulting multiTOMION model is illustrated with a first application to one of the infrequent datasets, including the whole day of June 5, 2017, with all the involved input data collocated, in particular the vessel-based GNSS ones. The results show in particular: (1) an overall GIM improvement of 3% in standard deviation versus independent JASON-3 VTEC measurements when LEO- and ground- based GPS data are combined with DORIS measurements. And (2) a local improvement of 6–9% in performance versus observed differences of STEC from independent GPS receivers placed at several hundreds of km far from the vessel.

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Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been developed thanks to the Atmosfiller project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and leaded by Rokubun S.L. The part of the study related with Galileo data was possible thanks to the former contributions of Dr. David Roma-Dollase. The authors are very grateful to the University of Hamburg and the Maria F. Merian crew for the vessel GNSS data. The authors also acknowledge to the International GNSS Service and related agencies the most part of the data used in this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-IonSAT), Barcelona, Spain

    Manuel Hernández-Pajares & Haixia Lyu

  2. IEEC-UPC, Barcelona, Spain

    Manuel Hernández-Pajares & Haixia Lyu

  3. Rokubun S.L., Barcelona, Spain

    Miquel Garcia-Fernandez

  4. ESA/ESTEC Wave Interaction and Propagation Section (TEC-EFW), Noordwijk, The Netherlands

    Raul Orus-Perez

Authors
  1. Manuel Hernández-Pajares
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  2. Haixia Lyu
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  3. Miquel Garcia-Fernandez
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  4. Raul Orus-Perez
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Contributions

MHP participated in the design of the study and did the data analysis. HL wrote the manuscript. MGF and ROP participated in the design of the study and helped to improve the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manuel Hernández-Pajares.

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Hernández-Pajares, M., Lyu, H., Garcia-Fernandez, M. et al. A new way of improving global ionospheric maps by ionospheric tomography: consistent combination of multi-GNSS and multi-space geodetic dual-frequency measurements gathered from vessel-, LEO- and ground-based receivers. J Geod 94, 73 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-020-01397-1

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