New method for deriving the topside ionospheric Vary-Chap scale height

An α-Chapman function with a continuously varying scale height H(h) can be used to describe the topside ionosphere electron density profile that seamlessly connects the ionosphere with the plasmasphere. Huang and Reinisch (2001) have derived the analytic expression of the scale height from the Vary-Chap function, which can be applied to the topside F2 region. However, the H(h) is still difficult to obtain because H(h) is a function of the unknown value H(h) at hmF2. In this paper, the maximum entropy method is introduced to solve this ill-posed problem, and the Vary-Chap scale height for each electron density profile is derived. Then the average percentage errors that defined as the differences between the measured electron density profiles and the Vary-Chap profiles obtained from the Vary-Chap scale heights are calculated with the Alouette/ISIS satellites topside sounder database. The results reveal that the average percentage errors are generally less than 5% and the Vary-Chap profiles can well represent the topside electron density profiles. What is more, the local time, seasonal, solar cycle, and latitudinal variations of the Vary-Chap scale height are preliminarily analyzed.