10.3389/fspas.2024.1434367">
 

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2024

Abstract

Intense ionization enhancements in the Earth’s ionosphere, known as sporadic-E (Es), can degrade and severely disrupt the propagation of radio signals. Although many previous studies have analyzed the characteristics and morphologies of sporadic-E, few efforts have attempted to model global Es occurrence rates (ORs) at high time resolutions. This study develops a global empirical model of blanketing sporadic-E occurrence rates using a Karhunen–Loéve Expansion (KLE) of a global OR climatology built with Global Navigation Satellite System radio occultation (GNSS-RO) and ionosonde observations. Using an fbE ≥ threshold of 3 MHz, the model outputs a blanketing sporadic-E OR for a given geomagnetic latitude, longitude, day of year, and local solar time. The model outputs are compared to digisonde observations at four sites with varying geomagnetic latitudes, resulting in correlation coefficients ranging from 0.5 to 0.9 for monthly averaged observations and an uncertainty of 11%. Furthermore, the average uncertainty is estimated to be 12%. This Global Empirical Model of Sporadic-E Occurrence Rates (GEMSOR) is capable of providing blanketing sporadic-E OR estimates for global radio frequency (RF) operations.

Comments

© 2024 The Authors.

This article is published by Frontiers, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Version of record change note: The PDF furnished on AFIT Scholar has been optimized in Adobe for file size. The original (73 Mb) PDF is available from the DOI link below.

Supplementary material is available here or from the article page. (3 videos, 1 data sheet)

Funding notes: This research was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR/RTB1), and NASA’s Living With Star and Sun-Climate research funds to the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) under WBS 936723.02.01.12.48.

Source Publication

Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences (e-ISSN 2296-987X)

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