Assessment of Ionospheric Real-time Data

Ionospheric delay is one of the major error sources for single-frequency receivers. To improve the accuracy of ionospheric corrections in real-time, some Ionosphere Associate Analysis Centers started to provide real-time global ionospheric data. However, the accuracy of them is unknown. In this sense, this study takes the real-time ionospheric data provided by Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as an example for assessment. First, the differences between different kinds of ionospheric data are calculated. Meanwhile, positioning accuracy corrected by real-time ionospheric data and ionospheric broadcast ionospheric model over different latitudes for different solar activity periods is presented. The experimental results show that the real-time ionospheric data cannot reflect the spatial variation over the oceanic region for the experimental period. The positioning accuracy corrected by real-time ionospheric data is better than that by ionospheric predicted products and Klobuchar model for high-latitude stations. However, the positioning accuracy corrected by real-time ionospheric data is a bit worse than that of Klobuchar model for mid-latitude stations, while it is better than that corrected by ionospheric predicted products and Klobuchar model for low-latitude stations.