Empirical Data Assimilation for Merging Total Electron Content Data with Empirical and Physical Models

An accurate estimation of ionospheric variables such as the total electron content (TEC) is important for many space weather, communication, and satellite geodetic applications. Empirical and physics-based models are often used to determine TEC in these applications. However, it is known that these models cannot reproduce all ionospheric variability due to various reasons such as their simplified model structure, coarse sampling of their inputs, and dependencies to the calibration period. Bayesian-based data assimilation (DA) techniques are often used for improving these model’s performance, but their computational cost is considerably large. In this study, first, we review the available DA techniques for upper atmosphere data assimilation. Then, we will present an empirical decomposition-based data assimilation (DDA), based on the principal component analysis and the ensemble Kalman filter. DDA considerably reduces the computational complexity of previous DA implementations. Its performance is demonstrated by updating the empirical orthogonal functions of the empirical NeQuick and the physics-based TIEGCM models using the rapid global ionosphere map (GIM) TEC products as observation. The new models, respectively, called ‘DDA-NeQuick’ and ‘DDA-TIEGCM,’ are then used to predict TEC values for the next day. Comparisons of the TEC forecasts with the final GIM TEC products (that are available after 11 days) represent an average \(42.46\%\) and \(31.89\%\) root mean squared error (RMSE) reduction during our test period, September 2017.