Abstract
High-resolution ionospheric structure estimation with low latency is
essential for the stable maintenance of various future services.
However, no papers have yet addressed this issue. In this paper, a new
algorithm for real-time high-resolution ionospheric tomography within a
large area is developed. The algorithm uses the property that the
ionospheric electron number density does not change significantly in 30
seconds, the observation interval of the Total Electron Content (TEC),
to estimate the unknown distribution using the known immediately
preceding distribution as the initial solution. The conjugate gradient
method is used to search for the solution, but it is converged very
quickly by using a diagonal scaling matrix, which is a very simple
preprocessing step. Using the algorithm on actual ionospheric data, we
found that it is possible to estimate the electron number density
distribution with an unprecedentedly high resolution of 0.25° square for
TEC data within a 1-minute interval. The algorithm also reconstructed
the ionospheric structure during the occurrence of Medium Scale
Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (MSTID), and was able to estimate the
detailed its horizontal and vertical structures. This indicates that
this algorithm is useful for real-time estimation of the
three-dimensional structure of ionosphere. Further development of a
system utilizing this algorithm will lead to further studies of the
ionospheric mechanisms.