Highlights The study reports the variations in ionosonde deduced foE over Pakistan. Peak noontime values are observed with annual variation over the country. IRI-2016 predicts foE remarkably well during the period of study. An artificial neural network based algo is proposed to predict daily noontime foE The proposed ANN model performs better than IRI-2016.

    Abstract The study presents the variation of ionospheric critical frequency of E-layer ( f o E ), its comparison with International Reference Ionosphere (IRI-2016) over Pakistan and suggests an artificial neural network (ANN) based algorithm to predict noontime daily hourly values. The ionosonde measurements of Karachi (Geog. Coord: 24.95 ° N, 67.13 ° E, dip latitude = 17.0 ° N), Multan (30.18 ° N, 71.48 ° E, 21.8 ° N) and Islamabad (33.75 ° N, 73.13 ° E, 25.2 ° N) have been used for the purpose. The observed f o E values have been analysed during the high, moderate and low solar activity years 1989, 1992 and 1996, respectively. Results show a strong correlation between f o E and solar activity which was expected because the E-layer is essentially solar controlled. It is found that f o E peaks around noon with higher values during summer. The annual relative percentage deviation between data and IRI-2016 modelled values remains less than 6% for all locations and years under study. The ANN based algorithm predicts daily noontime f o E values with a goodness of fit of 78%, compared to the IRI-2016 prediction, which has a goodness of fit of 71%. It is noted that the performance of IRI-2016 in predicting monthly hourly median values of f o E improves with decreasing solar activity. The study confirms the data authenticity of f o E over Pakistan and suggests an ANN based algorithm in predicting noontime values with no immediate updates to IRI-2016 for this Asian longitude sector.


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    Title :

    Variation of ionosonde f o E and its comparison with IRI-2016 & a local model over Pakistan longitude sector during solar cycle 22


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Advances in Space Research ; 71 , 10 ; 4340-4350


    Publication date :

    2022-12-19


    Size :

    11 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English