Ionospheric TEC modeling approach based on the characteristics of linear ionospheric variation
摘要
Traditional ionospheric modeling is inseparable from dense Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) reference stations. In this study, based on definite linear variation characteristics of the ionosphere along the longitudinal and latitudinal directions, a regional ionospheric total electron content (TEC) fusion model was proposed using relatively sparse GNSS linear stations beyond 100 km. Compared with the inverse distance weighting model using two adjacent stations with 100 km distance and three surrounding stations with 30 km distance, the accuracy of the proposed model has an improvement by 39.6% and 55.6% respectively, reaching a root-mean-square error of 0.32 TECU (TEC Unit) at mid-latitudes in high solar activity year. In the low solar activity year, the accuracy of the proposed model also achieves a high accuracy of 0.24 TECU at mid-latitudes and 0.86 TECU at low-latitudes. Finally, the proposed model was verified by precise point positioning (PPP). Compared with the traditional PPP, the ionosphere model enhanced PPP can significantly shorten the convergence time from 22.1 to 10.3 min in the magnetic storm period, and from 23.2 to 8.8 min in the quiet period.