Synthetic TEC mapping with kriging and random field priors

Abstract

Total Electron Content (TEC) can be used for analyzing the variability of the ionosphere in space and time. In this study, spatial interpolation is implemented by Kriging and Random Field Priors (RFP), which are widely used in geostatistics. Performance of Kriging and RFP methods are analyzed on synthetic TEC data for different trend functions, sampling patterns, sampling numbers, variance and range values of covariance function which is used to simulate the synthetic data, by comparing the normalized errors of interpolations. In regular sampling patterns, as opposed to random sampling, the normalized average error is very close to each other for all methods and trend assumptions. The error increases with variance and decreases with range. As the number of samples increase, the normalized error also decreases.