Comparison of EISCAT and ionosonde electron densities: application to a ground-based ionospheric segment of a space weather programme

摘要

Space weather applications require real-time data and wide area observationsfrom both ground- and space-based instrumentation. From space, the globalnavigation satellite system - GPS - is an important tool. From the groundthe incoherent scatter (IS) radar technique permits a direct measurement upto the topside region, while ionosondes give good measurements of the lowerpart of the ionosphere. An important issue is the intercalibration of thesevarious instruments.

In this paper, we address the intercomparison of the EISCAT IS radar andtwo ionosondes located at Tromsø (Norway), at times when GPS measurementswere also available. We show that even EISCAT data calibrated usingionosonde data can lead to different values of total electron content (TEC)when compared to that obtained from GPS.