The Virtual Heights of the Two Magneto-Ionic Components as an Indicator for Choosing the Most Accurate N(H)-Profile of the Ionosphere

The COSMIC satellite constellation provides the capability to determine the entire electron density profile. This allows the evaluation ionospheric model parameters, but also of full N(h)-profile (bottomside and topside) model specifications. In this work, the virtual heights of the two magneto-ionic components of the ionogram, close in time to the satellite flight, are used to test N(h)-profiles. The N(h)-profile calculated using the two components is used as the reference. The following options are compared with the N(h)-profile: (1) the IRI model adapted to measured ionosphere parameters from the ionosonde N(h)-profile, (2) the COSMIC N(h)-profile satellite, (3) the N(h)-profile from the auto-scaled ionogram obtained from DIDBASE, (4) the original IRI model. The comparison for 6 European stations shows that all profiles near hmF2 provide close results. For the coincidence over the whole profile, the best conformity with the reference is provided by the IRI model profile adapted to the auto-scaled ionogram obtained from DIDBASE. The COSMIC profile for a number of stations gives a worse match than the original IRI model. The conformity depends on latitude and is best for a low-latitude station and worst for a high-latitude station. It is noted that such lacks of vertical sounding as limited minimum frequency and large signal noise can be reduced by using neural network methods.