ULF Geomagnetic Field Oscillations, Their Connection to Medium Scale TIDs and Remedies for GPS Applications

Peter F. Kolb

Abstract:	The recent years have seen considerable research efforts in the field of traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs) of different scales. Thereby the medium scale TIDs (MSTIDs) hold the largest part of the still unresolved error budget in high precision GNSS applications. In parallel, three years ago, Kepko and Spence (2003) discovered that the solar wind excites compressional oscillations in earth’s magnetosphere. These oscillations are of ultra low frequency (ULF) and exhibit a power spectrum with distinct frequencies of around 1 mHz which parallel the power spectrum of solar wind pressure. In this paper we present different techniques to extract the manifestation of MSTIDs in the geometry free combination of dual frequency GNSS phase observations, both by a single receiver as well as for multi-receiver settings. A thorough analysis of the extracted signal reveals for the first time a clear connection between MSTIDs and ULF waves. We thereby test very different geographic locations. The MSTIDs are found to follow a very universal behavior pattern under all conditions. We will show that the universal behavior of MSTIDS is again reflected in the residual errors of GNSS applications. Due to the gained knowledge about the interconnection of physical processes responsible for the residual error, we propose strategies to provide real-time corrections for the periodic errors.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (2007) April 23 - 25, 2007 Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge, MA
Pages:	164 - 172
Cite this article:	Kolb, Peter F., "ULF Geomagnetic Field Oscillations, Their Connection to Medium Scale TIDs and Remedies for GPS Applications," Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (2007), Cambridge, MA, April 2007, pp. 164-172.
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