Towards cooperative global mapping of the ionosphere: Fusion feasibility for IGS and IRI with global climate VTEC maps

Recommendations of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) Workshop 2017 in Taoyuan City, Taiwan and International GNSS Service (IGS) Workshop 2018 in Wuhan, China included establishment of an ionosphere mapping service that would fuse measurements from two independent sensor networks: IGS permanent GNSS receivers providing the vertical total electron content (VTEC) measurements and ionosondes of the Global Ionosphere Radio Observatory (GIRO) that compute the bottomside vertical profiles of the ionospheric plasma density.

Using available GAMBIT software at GIRO, we introduced new VTEC products to its data roster: previously unavailable global average (climate) maps of VTEC and slab thickness based on climatological capabilities of IRI. Incorporation of the VTEC and tau maps into the GAMBIT Explorer environment provided data analysts with nearly 10-year history of the reference average VTEC records and opened access to the GAMBIT toolkit for evaluation and validation of the tau computations.