The Vertical Ionosphere Parameters Inversion for High Frequency Surface Wave Radar

Abstract EN

High Frequency Surface Wave Radar (HFSWR), which is currently applied in over-the-horizon detection of targets and sea states remote sensing, can receive a huge mass of ionospheric echoes, making it possible for the ionospheric clutter suppression to become a hot spot in research area.

In this paper, from another perspective, we take the ionospheric echoes as the signal source rather than clutters, which provides the possibility of extracting information regarding the ionosphere region and explores a new application field for HFSWR.

Primarily, pretreatment of threshold segmentation as well as connected region generation is used in the Range-Doppler (R-D) Spectrum to extract the ionospheric echoes.

Then, electron density and plasma frequency of field aligned irregularities (FAIs) caused by plasma instabilities in the F region are obtained by the coherent backscattered radar equation.

The plasma drift velocity of FAIs can also be estimated from Doppler shift.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of inversion is verified by comparing with IRI2012.