3D tomography of midlatitude sporadic-E in Japan from GNSS-TEC data

Ihsan Naufal Muafiry, Kosuke Heki, Jun Maeda
2018 Earth, Planets and Space  
We studied ionospheric irregularities caused by midlatitude sporadic-E (Es) in Japan using ionospheric total electron content (TEC) data from a dense GNSS array, GEONET, with a 3D (three-dimensional) tomography technique. Es is a thin layer of unusually high ionization that appears at altitudes of ~ 100 km. Here, we studied five cases of Es irregularities in 2010 and 2012, also reported in previous studies, over the Kanto and Kyushu Districts. We used slant TEC residuals as the input and
more » ... ed the number of electron density anomalies of more than 2000 small blocks with dimensions of 20-30 km covering a horizontal region of 300 × 500 km. We applied a continuity constraint to stabilize the solution and performed several different resolution tests with synthetic data to assess the accuracy of the results. The tomography results showed that positive electron density anomalies occurred at the E region height, and the morphology and dynamics were consistent with those reported by earlier studies. which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
doi:10.1186/s40623-018-0815-7 fatcat:ppdvorybmjgbbanhrmvnqrasqq