On the application of differential phase measurements to study the zonal large scale wave structure (LSWS) in the ionospheric electron content

Abstract

The GNU Radio Beacon Receiver (GRBR) Network has been recently established to provide coverage of Southeast Asia and Pacific low-latitude regions, with planned extensions into the Indian and African longitude sectors. With the availability of CERTO (Coherent Electromagnetic Radio Tomography) beacon transmissions from Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite, which is in a unique low-inclination (13°) orbit, it is now possible to study zonal large scale wave structure (LSWS) in ionospheric total electron content (TEC) with fine spatial resolution over a wide longitudinal region. An automated procedure to determine absolute TEC from relative TEC measurements for low inclination CNOFS orbits has been implemented through a simple single station procedure for initial offset estimation, which is shown to be consistent with the better established two station method and with observations from a Digisonde. The LSWS is extracted by subtracting the background variation from longitudinal variation of TEC. The upwellings of LSWS manifest as depletions in the residual TEC variations. Further, these zonal structures have been found, in general, to be aligned with geomagnetic field lines, and the scintillation patches have been found to align with the west walls of TEC depletions. This spatial alignment recapitulates the premise that the observed zonal wave-like structures in TEC are the manifestations of bottom side LSWS. Hence, the methodology presented in this paper, would prove useful in future, to study the characteristics of LSWS on a regular basis.