Performance of NavIC for studying the ionosphere at an EIA region in India

Abstract

This paper emphasizes on NavIC's performance in ionospheric studies over the Indian subcontinent region. The study is performed using data of one year (2017–18) at IIT Indore, a location near the northern crest of Equatorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA). It has been observed that even without the individual error corrections, the results are within ±20% of NavIC VTEC estimates observed over the 1° × 1° grid of IPP surrounding the GPS VTEC estimates for most of the time. Additionally, ionospheric response during two distinct geomagnetic storms (September 08 and 28, 2017) at the same location and other IGS stations covering the Indian subcontinent using both GPS and NavIC has also been presented. This analysis revealed similar variations in TEC during the geomagnetic storms of September 2017, indicating the suitability of NavIC to study space weather events along with the ionospheric studies over the Indian subcontinent. © 2019 COSPAR