Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Ionospheric Effects on Microwave Signals
Mahdi M. Alizadeh, Dudy D. Wijaya, Thomas Hobiger,
Robert Weber and Harald Schuh
Abstract
The ionosphere is a dispersive medium for space geodetic techniques
operating in the microwave band. Thus, signals traveling through this medium are—
to the first approximation—affected proportionally to the inverse of the square of
their frequencies. This effect, on the other hand, can reveal information about the
parameters of the ionosphere in terms of Total Electron Content (TEC) of the elec-
tron density. This part of the topic provides an overview of ionospheric effects on
microwave signals. First, the group and phase velocities are defined along with the
refractive index in the ionosphere and the ionospheric delay. Then, we focus mainly
on the mitigation and elimination of ionospheric delays in the analysis of space
