A comparison of the LPIM-COSMIC F2 peak parameters determinations against the IRI(CCIR) predictions

AZPILICUETA FRANCISCO; ALTADILL DAVID; BRUNINI CLAUDIO; TORTA J M; BLANCH E

Workshop; IRI Workshop 2013 “IRI and GNSS”; 2013

Department of Astronomy and Geodynamics of the University of Warmia and Mazury (UWM)

On April 2006, Taiwan and US jointly launched the COSMIC/Formosat-3 (C/F3) mission, consisting on six identical micro-satellites each one carrying a set of advanced GPS receivers that continuously record the measurements to all the observed GPS satellites. The C/F3 mission team routinely processes the TEC measurements with an Abel’s inversion technique and makes available to the community (at http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/) electron density distribution files estimated for each radio occultation (RO) event. Contrarily to what could be expected, retrieving the F2 peak parameters from these data files is not as simple as seeking for the height in which the electron density determination reaches its maximum. For retrieving the F2 peak information we have used the La Plata Ionospheric Model (LPIM) that performs several verification and validation tests over the data and finally by means of a Least Squares scheme fits the F2 peak parameters of a modified Chapman layer profile that better reproduces the observations. LPIM is a development of the GESA group of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina, with more than 15 years of continuous enhancement. It is a very powerful tool for assimilating TEC and electron density estimations from many different data sources. In the context of the present work we have applied the LPIM to a C/F3 data series that goes from January 2008 to October 2012 obtaining F2 peak parameters values (LPIM-C/F3) for each RO event occurred during this period. This presentation aims to assess the quality of the F2 peak parameters estimations by comparing them with the widely used IRI(CCIR) hmF2 and NmF2 predictions and with the hmF2 predictions by from the model developed by the Ebro team. The analysis is applied on a global scale, understanding the behavior of the different geomagnetic regions. The effect of the seasons and the solar activity levels is also considered. Finally, we explore the possibility of using the LPIM-C/F3 estimations to produce new sets of data grids/maps of the hmF2 and NmF2, along with their standard deviation estimations, and we present some preliminary results.