Toward a SIRGAS Service for Mapping the Ionosphere?s Electron Density Distribution

BRUNINI C.; AZPILICUETA F.; GENDE M.; ARAGÓN-ANGEL A.; HERNÁNDEZ-PAJARES M.; JUAN J.M; SANZ J.

Geodesy for Planet Earth

Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Año: 2012; p. 753 - 760

SIRGAS is responsible of the terrestrial reference frame of Latin America and the Caribbean. To fulfil this commitment it manages a continuously operational GNSS network with more than 200 receivers. Although that network was not planed for ionospheric studies, SIRGAS attempted to exploit it by establishing, in early 2008, a regular service for computing regional maps of the vertical Total Electron Content. This paper describes an effort for developing a new SIRGAS product, concretely, a 4-dimensional (space and time) representation of the free electron distribution in the ionosphere. The working methodology is based on the ingestion of dual-frequency GNSS observations into a global electron density model in order to update its parameters. Preliminary results are presented and their quality is assessed by comparing the electron density computed with the method- ology here described and the one estimated from totally independent observations. A preliminary analysis reveals that the performance of the electron density model improves by a factor greater than 2 after data ingestion.