Abstract:
In this study, we develop a three-dimensional ionospheric tomography with the ground-based global position system
(GPS) total electron content observations. Because of the geometric limitation of GPS observation path, it is difficult
to solve the ill-posed inverse problem for the ionospheric electron density. Different from methods given by pervious
studies, we consider an algorithm combining the least-square method with a constraint condition, in which the
gradient of electron density tends to be smooth in the horizontal direction and steep in the vicinity of the ionospheric
F2 peak. This algorithm is designed to be independent of any ionospheric or plasmaspheric electron density models
as the initial condition. An observation system simulation experiment method is applied to evaluate the performance
of the GPS ionospheric tomography in detecting ionospheric electron density perturbation at the scale size of around
200 km in wavelength, such as the medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances.
