Ionospheric Total Electron Content and Disturbance Observations From Space-Borne Coherent GNSS-R Measurements

In this article, we investigate coherent global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R) measurements obtained at the low earth orbits (LEOs) as a potential new data source for ionospheric total electron content (TEC) and ionospheric disturbance observations. Current global ionospheric TEC maps (GIMs) have limited spatial and temporal resolutions and accuracy due to lack of GNSS observations over oceans, polar caps, and inaccessible terrains. Our analysis of Spire Global’s CubeSat data indicates that coherent GNSS signals reflected off sea ice, inland water bodies, and calm ocean surface can be processed to achieve cm-level precision carrier phase estimations. Signal coherency is especially prevalent over sea ice where 41.7% reflections are coherent, compared to 4.3% in the overall dataset. This article presents the methodology to estimate slant TEC along the reflection signal ray path using coherent dual-frequency GNSS-R pseudoranage and carrier phase estimations obtained from low-cost CubeSats. The methodology is applied to Spire Global’s CubeSat data. The results show that the slant TEC retrieved from GNSS-R measurements and from GIM follow a similar trend. Moreover, the GNSS-R-based TEC time series offer a nearly “frozen in time” observation of the ionospheric structures due to the rapid scan velocity of GNSS-R rays across the ionosphere. The study demonstrates the potential of GNSS-R observations to fill the data gaps over the polar regions where space weather activities and TEC disturbances are most frequent and intense. Potential error sources and mitigation techniques are also discussed.