Empirical orthogonal function based modelling of ionosphere using Turkish GNSS network

Abstract

The study investigates ionospheric total electron content (TEC) variation over Turkey from the five selected global navigation satellite system (GNSS) stations situated in diverse parts of Turkey. The geomagnetic indices are used and observed TEC are modeled with the technique known as Empirical orthogonal function (EOF). It is valuable to note that the correlation coefficient between observed GNSS TEC values and EOF TEC values varies from 0.8020 to 0.9394. The root means square error (RMSE) values between observed GNSS TEC values and EOF TEC lie between 3.1665 TECU to 4.4220 TECU. These results show that the EOF model performs quite well in the Turkish region and can present the model TEC variations perfectly. Finally, these GNSS observed and EOF-predicted TEC values along with geomagnetic indices are studied with the tropospheric wind speed. The results showed that both observed and modeled TEC have very low correlations with tropospheric wind speed and do not provide any significant value. Hence, we concluded that the ionospheric region is not affected by tropospheric wind speed. It happens because the tropospheric wind speed is a matter of the lower troposphere and its atmospheric pressure while the ionosphere is far from the earth and depends upon the number of free electrons.