Complementing regional ground GNSS-STEC computerized ionospheric tomography (CIT) with ionosonde data assimilation

A near-real-time computerized ionospheric tomography (CIT) technique was developed over the East Asian sector to specify the 3-D electron density field. The technique is based on a plethora of Global Navigation Satellite System observables within the region of interest which is bounded horizontally 110°–160°E and 10°–60°N and extending from 80 to 25,000 km in altitude. Prior to deployment, studies validated the CIT results using ionosonde, middle-upper atmosphere radar and occultation data and found the technique to adequately reconstruct the regional ionosphere vertical structure. However, with room for improvement in estimating the peak height and avoiding physically unrealistic negative densities in the final solution, we present preliminary results from a technique that addresses these issues by incorporating CIT results into a data assimilation (DA) technique. The DA technique adds ionosonde bottomside measurements into CIT results, thereby improving the accuracy of the reconstructed bottomside 3-D structure. More specifically, on average CIT NmF2 and hmF2 improve by more than 60%. Further, during analysis, ionospheric electron densities are assumed to be better described by probability log-normal distribution, which introduces the positivity constraint that is mandatory in ionospheric imaging.