Plasmaspheric and Enhanced Ionospheric Total Electron Content Monitoring

The integrated charge density through the ionosphere and plasmasphere along a line-of-sight, denoted Total Electron Content (TEC), is a quantity that influences the operation of various radio-frequency systems. Measurement of TEC is utilized in order to assess environmental or system impacts, with possibilities for correction or mitigation. The current primary source of TEC measurements is dual-frequency Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver systems. These measurements contain contributions from the ionosphere and the plasmasphere, as well as biases arising from instrumental sources. While plasmasphere charge densities are considerably less than those of the ionosphere, the large extent of the plasmasphere can produce a significant integrated contribution relative to that of the ionosphere. The instrumental biases can be of any magnitude. To achieve highly accurate measurements of ionospheric TEC, an accurate technique to eliminate the bias effects from the GPS TEC measurements and partition the observed TEC into ionosphere and plasmasphere components is required. Developments of a mathematical technique, based on observed characteristics of the ionosphere, have presented the opportunity for conducting separate measurements of the ionosphere and plasmasphere contributions to TEC. This proposal presents efforts to be undertaken for further developments and validation of this technique.