Use of radio-occultation data for ionospheric imaging during the April 2002 disturbances

In 1994, Hajj et al. (1994) proposed the use of radio occultation data in ionospheric imaging. The advantages gained by including this data source are examined in this paper. Many data sources including ground-based and satellite-based observations are available for the events of the April 2002 ionospheric disturbance. This period has been chosen to study simultaneous images of the disturbed ionosphere over the USA and Europe. A 4D tomographic imaging technique known as Multi-instrument Data Analysis System (MIDAS) (Mitchell and Spencer, 2003) is applied in this study. The primary purpose of the study is to compare images produced with and without the use of radio-occultation data. The work investigates whether GPS occultation combined with ground-based GPS data improves the determination of peak height and peak density in the images. The results indicate that the occultation data improve both the peak height and the peak density in the images. The use of ionosonde data is also examined and the results are compared between the USA and Europe.