Static tomographic reconstruction of the time varying ionosphere

An image of electron density in a vertical slice through the ionosphere can be created using tomographic techniques. An ionospheric tomography system consists of a satellite and several ground stations. Ionospheric electron density can change significantly during the time it takes to collect enough data for one image. In many other applications of tomography, motion of an object in the source image produces obvious artifacts in the reconstruction such as streaking along object edges. For ionospheric tomography, the effects of motion in the source image are less obvious but nevertheless cause serious errors in the reconstruction. This paper discusses the effects of motion in the ionosphere on static ionospheric tomography reconstructions, and suggests ways to detect that a reconstruction has been corrupted by motion in the source image. Several simulated examples are presented using two different ionospheric tomography reconstruction algorithms