Vertical structure of medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances

Abstract

We develop an algorithm of computerized ionospheric tomography (CIT) to infer information on the vertical and horizontal structuring of electron density during nighttime medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs). To facilitate digital CIT we have adopted total electron contents (TEC) from a dense Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver network, GEONET, which contains more than 1000 receivers. A multiplicative algebraic reconstruction technique was utilized with a calibrated IRI-2012 model as an initial solution. The reconstructed F2 peak layer varied in altitude with average peak-to-peak amplitude of ~52 km. In addition, the F2 peak layer anticorrelated with TEC variations. This feature supports a theory in which nighttime MSTID is composed of oscillating electric fields due to conductivity variations. Moreover, reconstructed TEC variations over two stations were reasonably close to variations directly derived from the measured TEC data set. Our tomographic analysis may thus help understand three-dimensional structure of MSTIDs in a quantitative way.