Statistics – Applications
Scientific paper
Dec 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmsa51d1656m&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #SA51D-1656
Statistics
Applications
[2447] Ionosphere / Modeling And Forecasting
Scientific paper
The central thrust of this paper is that the assimilation of ionosonde profiles into a global model of the ionosphere can have only limited regional effects. A large part of the globe will still be represented by profiles given by the background ionosphere model. Thus while ionosonde profiles can be assimilated in real time, another equally important use for them will be for off-line validation of the background ionosphere model. The Global Assimilation of Ionospheric Measurement (GAIM) model used by the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) is the Gauss-Markov version of the Utah State University GAIM model (GAIM-GM). Among other data types such as slant TEC from GPS sites, GAIM-GM will assimilate plasma frequency profiles derived from vertical incidence ionograms. In fact, ionosonde profiles up to the height of the F2 maximum (hmF2) provide the only direct assimilation data for that height range. Observations such as TEC give only integrated quantities, the bulk of which comes from above hmF2. Each ionosonde can be considered to represent the ionosphere below hmF2 out to a distance equal to some correlation length, which can optimistically be set to ~1000 km. Given the limited number of ionosondes contributing a profile at any given time, the global coverage provided by ionosondes can therefore at best be described as sparse. This means that the GAIM-GM profiles over most of the Earth will not be very different from those of the background physics-based model, which is the Ionospheric Forecast Model (IFM). If the GAIM-GM profiles below hmF2 are to be used for HF applications such as OTHR Coordinate Registration, it is essential that the IFM produce reliable plasma frequency profiles. As illustrated in this paper, comparisons of the IFM profiles with ionogram profiles have shown that there are systematic errors in the IFM profiles. These errors indicate limitations of the underlying physics used by the IFM. The paper calls for a concerted effort to provide reliable plasma frequency profiles that can be used as ground truth in the further development and validation of GAIM-GM and its planned successor, GAIM Full Physics. An extensive set of ionograms should be manually selected and processed, so as to provide complete and reliably scaled ionogram traces that can be reduced with minimum uncertainty to plasma frequency profiles. The emphasis should be on generating a limited number of reliable profiles, not on establishing an extensive database of profiles with uncertain validity.
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