Automatic Identification of the Main Ionospheric Trough in Total
Electron Content Images
Abstract
The main ionospheric trough (MIT) is a salient density feature in the
mid-latitude ionosphere and characterizing its structure is important
for understanding GPS and HF signal propagation, and identifying
geospace phenomena such as the plasmapause boundary layer. While a
number of previous studies have statistically investigated the
properties of the MIT utilizing low-altitude satellite observations,
they have been limited to latitudinal cross sections, and have not
considered the inherent two-dimensional structure of the trough. In this
work, we develop a regularized inversion method for identifying the two
dimensional structure of the trough in Total Electron Content (TEC)
maps. Because no ground truth labels exist for the MIT, we extensively
characterize the behavior of the algorithm by comparing it to the method
developed by \citeA{aa-2020}. We show that statistics
computed on the resulting labels are robust to our choice of algorithm
parameters and that we are able to match the results of
\citeA{aa-2020} with a particular selection of the
parameters. Without ground truth, these two properties provide much
stronger verification than a comparison using a single parameter
setting. In addition to enabling fundamentally different studies, our
MIT labels are able to provide statistical MIT properties with higher
resolution.