A global empirical orthogonal function model of plasmaspheric electron content

Based on the method for establishing a global plasmaspheric model using observations from COSMIC and MetOp-A orbit determination GNSS receivers, Chen et al. (2017) obtained a global plasmaspheric total electron content product with a spatial resolution of 2.5° × 5° and a time resolution of 4 h. In this paper, we use those global plasmaspheric electron content product in 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 for 1446 days to establish a global plasmaspheric empirical model based on empirical orthogonal function (EOF). The model can well characterize the spatiotemporal variation of plasmaspheric electron content (PEC) and the influence of solar radiation on it. Only the first four orders of EOF sequences can characterize the 98.43% features of the original PEC dataset. The principal component coefficient Pk is decomposed twice during modeling, and the combination of trigonometric function and linear function is used to model Pk to characterize the solar cycle, annual cycle, semi-annual cycle and quarter-cycle variation. We compare the PEC model values with the actual observation data, the results show that the empirical PEC model values are highly correlated with the actual observations. The correlation between the two is above 0.96, and the RMS maximum of the difference between the PEC model values and the observed values are 0.70 TECU, and the average of the difference between the PEC model values and the observed values are ?0.18 TECU, respectively. In addition, we validate the reliability of the global plasmaspheric model established by two empirical orthogonal function decomposition method using actual observation data, according to the global distribution of the differences between the PEC model values and the observed values in low solar activity and high solar activity, it can be seen that under low solar activity and high solar activity conditions, the model has good adaptability.