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MuSIK

Multi-Scale Ionosphere Model from Combination of Modern Satellite observation Techniques

Near real-time high resolution ionosphere models are used in many applications as in telecommunication, navigation and remote sensing. Today these ionosphere models are mostly empirical, i.e. provide only climatological information.

Illustration of the global 3D electron density distribution reconstructed from ground based and space based GNSS measurements

The project MuSIK is a first step in developing a mathematical-physical model of the ionospheric electron density distribution. Thus, the long-term development of a data driven physical ionospheric model will be prepared.

The developed techniques shall allow routine monitoring of regional ionosphere with high spatial and temporal resolution. For testing the modelling technique, the South American region is selected. This is a challenging task because this region is characterized by specific low latitude ionospheric phenomena such as the equatorial anomaly.

The main features of the project are

• consideration of physics-based modelling approaches, which are introduced in the multi-dimensional ionosphere model by means of appropriate mathematical base functions
• estimation of the model parameters from the combination of various space-geodetic techniques
• transformation of the results into a multi-scale representation enabling an effective data compression necessary for near-real-time handling the huge ionosphere data sets

MuSIK provides a solid basis for envisaged long-term developments of data driven physical models.

The project is supported by the German science Foundation (DFG), coordinated by the Institute of Astronomical and Physical Geodesy (IAPG) of the Technical University Munich (TUM) and performed also in cooperation with the German Geodetic Research Institute (DGFI).

The project has been started on January 1st, 2011 and has duration of 3 years.

Support: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Consortium

Institut für Astronomische und Physikalische Geodäsie (IAPG) of TU München (Prime)

Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR)

Deutsches Geodätisches Forschungsinstitut (DGFI)

Duration: 2011-2013