group
What campus are you from?
Daytona Beach
Authors' Class Standing
Maya McKean, Senior
Lead Presenter's Name
Maya McKean
Faculty Mentor Name
Enrique Rojas
Abstract
The global coverage of total electron content (TEC) measurements from ground-based GNSS receivers and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations offers an opportunity to extract physical insights into the ionosphere. However, many current analyses treat these datasets in isolation, focusing on geometry-specific inversion methods that limit the exploitation of their complementary information. In this work, we present a unified framework for reconstructing ionospheric electron density volumes by combining slant TEC observations from both ground-based and spaceborne receivers. Our approach relies on vertical parameterizations of the electron density profile, which we constrain horizontally through spatial interpolation and optimize via nonlinear fitting of integrated TEC. To choose our vertical models, we leverage the historical database of vertical electron density profiles from MIT Haystack Observatory’s Incoherent Scatter Radar (ISR). Preliminary results demonstrate how this framework can resolve fine-scale ionospheric structures using low-dimensional parameterization. Neutral atmosphere reconstructions have been performed in multiple dimensions, and preliminary results for modeling gravity wave signatures while recovering their features.
Did this research project receive funding support from the Office of Undergraduate Research.
No
Revisiting Ionospheric Tomography: Non-linear Fitting with Neutral Atmospheric Signatures and Gravity Waves
The global coverage of total electron content (TEC) measurements from ground-based GNSS receivers and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations offers an opportunity to extract physical insights into the ionosphere. However, many current analyses treat these datasets in isolation, focusing on geometry-specific inversion methods that limit the exploitation of their complementary information. In this work, we present a unified framework for reconstructing ionospheric electron density volumes by combining slant TEC observations from both ground-based and spaceborne receivers. Our approach relies on vertical parameterizations of the electron density profile, which we constrain horizontally through spatial interpolation and optimize via nonlinear fitting of integrated TEC. To choose our vertical models, we leverage the historical database of vertical electron density profiles from MIT Haystack Observatory’s Incoherent Scatter Radar (ISR). Preliminary results demonstrate how this framework can resolve fine-scale ionospheric structures using low-dimensional parameterization. Neutral atmosphere reconstructions have been performed in multiple dimensions, and preliminary results for modeling gravity wave signatures while recovering their features.