A power law power spectral density model of total electron content structure in the polar region

Measurements by the early warning radar at Thule, Greenland, together with GPS measurements from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Ionospheric Measurement System (IMS) receiver, have been analyzed to develop a model for the structure of the total electron content (TEC) of the polar ionosphere. For the model the TEC measurements are related to the Wide Band Model (WBMOD), a climatological model of small-scale ionization structure. The TEC data agree very well with the predictions of a simple extension of WBMOD to larger scales, where a slightly steeper spectral slope (p ≈ 3) is used for the TEC structure (compared to p = 2.7 for the small-scale structure of WBMOD's polar region model). The benefit of this approach is that the TEC model subsumes the climatology of WBMOD, which is built upon two solar cycles of ionospheric measurements.