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Climatological and Space Weather related features of the Ionosphere
[1]
- © S. Kamal (DLR) base on picture from NASA/NOAA
Sumon
Kamal
Fakulty VI - Planning Building
Environment, Technical University Berlin
DLR Neustrelitz
The ionosphere is the ionized part of the earth’s upper
atmosphere, ranging from approximately 60 km to 1000 km height. Due to
its electrical conductivity, the ionosphere influences the terrestrial
and trans-ionospheric propagation of radio waves. This in turn has an
effect on radio communication as well as satellite based
navigation.
Radio occultation (RO) is one of the most
effective space based remote-sensing techniques for exploring
planetary atmospheres. By tracking the signals of Global Navigation
Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS, GLONASS, Galileo or BeiDou from
low earth orbiting (LEO) satellites in limb-viewing geometry, it
enables a continuous and global monitoring of the earth's ionosphere
and neutral atmosphere.
The state of the ionosphere is
affected by several geophysical properties. For example, particle
precipitation of magnetospheric origin causes an additional ionization
of the ionosphere in the auroral zone at E-layer heights. This
significantly affects high frequency (HF) signal propagation. Electron
density profiles, derived from GNSS based ionospheric radio
occultation (IRO) measurements in the polar region sometimes have
their maximum density at E-layer height. Such an ionization structure
is called E-layer dominated ionosphere (ELDI) as introduced in [1]. In
the project, climatological and space weather related characteristics,
such as geophysical conditions and spatio-temporal distributions of
ELDI-related ionospheric processes as well as high-latitude
ionospheric disturbances will be evaluated. Therefore, space-based IRO
measurements aboard LEO satellites will be used in coordination with
ground-based ionospheric measurements from ionosondes and EISCAT
radars. The findings will serve as the basis for the development of an
empirical model to describe ELDI properties which will be integrated
into the Neustrelitz Electron Density Model (NEDM).
This
project runs in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in
Neustrelitz: https://www.dlr.de/dlr/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10260
[2]
References:
[1] Mayer, C. and N. Jakowski,
Enhanced E layer Ionization in the Auroral Zones Observed by Radio
Occultation Measurements Onboard CHAMP and Formosat-3/COSMIC, Annales
Geophysicae, 27, 1207-1212, 2009
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