Regional ionospheric model response of geomagnetic storm during March 2015 using data fusion mechanism: GPS, COSMIC RO and SWARM

The total electron content (TEC) maps are chosen as the elementary structures to provide ionospheric corrections for improving the positional accuracy for Global Navigational Satellite Systems (GNSS) users. Availability of total electron content data from a multi-constellation of satellite systems and various ground-based instruments possess an ability to monitor, nowcast and forecast the behavior of the ionosphere region. Conversely, combining ionospheric TEC data from different temporal and spatial scales is a difficult task to augment either ground or space-based ionospheric model's accuracy. And hence, a method like data fusion is essential to illustrate the ionospheric variability and to improve the accuracy of ionospheric models under equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA) conditions. This paper presented the weighted least square data fusion method with multi-instrument TEC data to analyze the EIA TEC structures in the low-latitude Indian region. Both ground-based (GPS TEC from 26 stations in the Indian region) and space-based (FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC RO and SWARM mini satellite constellation) observations are used for the analysis. The spherical harmonic function (SHF) model of order 2, which gives nine SHF coefficients, is implemented. The analysis illustrates that the SHF coefficients followed by TEC data fusion would be useful to investigate the entry, occupancy and exit TEC structures of EIA during geomagnetic storm conditions.