Overview about the project MuSE: Multi-Satellite ionosphere-plasmasphere Electron density reconstruction

The ionosphere is the ionized upper part of the Earth's atmosphere that merges into the plasmasphere. During the propagation through the ionosphere and plasmasphere, L-band signals of GNSS satellites are delayed. The mitigation of ionospheric effects on radio waves is a critical issue for applications utilizing trans-ionospheric signals such as GNSS navigation, GNSS related augmentation systems (e.g. EGNOS and WAAS) and remote sensing. The reconstruction of the ionosphere and plasmasphere is one of the powerful tools to provide link specific ionospheric corrections as well as to study physical processes in the ionosphere and plasmasphere. The German Research Foundation (DFG) established the Priority Programme “DynamicEarth” (SPP 1788), focusing on the quantification of terrestrial transport mechanisms and solar-terrestrial interactions. As a part of this SPP, the project MuSE aims at the development of a topside ionosphere-plasmasphere model, which is capable to assimilate various measurements and exploits especially the measurements of the low-Earth orbiters of ESA’s SWARM mission. This presentation gives an overview about the MuSE project and the first achieved results. We discuss possible data assimilation procedures and show initial test results. We outline the plasmapause location proxy, developed on the basis of magnetic field data of the SWARM satellites. We sketch out different approaches for the calculation of an appropriate initial guess of the ionosphere-plasmasphere state vector. Finally, open issues and next steps of the project are pointed out     «

The ionosphere is the ionized upper part of the Earth's atmosphere that merges into the plasmasphere. During the propagation through the ionosphere and plasmasphere, L-band signals of GNSS satellites are delayed. The mitigation of ionospheric effects on radio waves is a critical issue for applications utilizing trans-ionospheric signals such as GNSS navigation, GNSS related augmentation systems (e.g. EGNOS and WAAS) and remote sensing. The reconstruction of the ionosphere and plasmasphere is...     »