Performance Evaluation of Ionosphere Modeling Using Spherical Harmonics in the Korean Peninsula

Abstract

The signal broadcast from a GPS satellite experiences code delay and carrier phase advance while passing through the ionosphere, which causes a signal error. Many ionosphere models have been studied to correct this ionospheric delay error. In this paper, the ionosphere modeling for the Korean Peninsula was carried out using a spherical harmonics based model. In contrast to the previous studies, we considered a real-time ionospheric delay correction model using fewer number of basis functions. The modeling performance was evaluated by comparing with a grid model. Total number of basis functions was set to be identical to the number of grid points in the grid model. The performance test was conducted using the GPS measurements collected from 5 reference stations during 24 hours. In the test result, the modeling residual error was smaller than that of the existing grid model. However, when the number of measurements was small and the measurements were not evenly distributed, the overall trend was found to be problematic. For improving this problem, we implemented the modeling with additional virtual measurements.