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Exploring Earth’s ionosphere and its effect on low radio frequency observation with the uGMRT and the SKA

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Abstract

The Earth’s ionosphere introduces systematic effects that limit the performance of a radio interferometer at low frequencies (\({\lesssim }1\) GHz). These effects become more pronounced for severe geomagnetic activities or observations involving longer interferometer baselines. The uGMRT, a pathfinder for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), is located between the northern crest of the Equatorial ionisation Anomaly (EIA) and the magnetic equator. Hence, this telescope is more prone to severe ionospheric conditions and is a unique radio interferometer for studying the ionosphere. Here, we present 235 MHz observations with the GMRT, showing significant ionospheric activities over a solar minimum. This work has characterised the ionospheric disturbances observed with the GMRT. We have compared them with ionospheric studies and observations with other telescopes like the VLA, MWA and LOFAR situated at different magnetic latitudes. We have estimated the ionospheric total electron content (TEC) gradient over the full GMRT array, showing an order of magnitude higher sensitivity than the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Furthermore, this article uses the ionospheric characteristics estimated from the observations with uGMRT, VLA, LOFAR and MWA to forecast the effects of the low-frequency observations with the SKA1-MID and SKA1-LOW in the future.

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Notes

  1. The ratio between the peak flux on the image and root mean square noise in a region believed to be source free region.

  2. The readers are referred to Project summary of the SKA1 https://www.skatelescope.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/22380_SKA_Project-Summary_v4_single-pages.pdf.

  3. CASA https://casa.nrao.edu/

  4. IRI extended to Plasmasphere http://www.ionolab.org/iriplasonline/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the staff of the GMRT who have made these observations possible. GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. SM would like to thank the financial assistance from the University Grants Commission. SM further acknowledges Aishrila Mazumder for helpful discussions. The work of SC is supported by the Department of Space, Government of India. AD would like to acknowledge the support from CSIR through EMR-II No. 03(1461)/19.

This study also made use of MATPLOTLIB (Hunter 2007) open-source plotting packages for PYTHON.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Astronomy, Astrophysics and Space Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, 453552, India

    Sarvesh Mangla, Sumanjit Chakraborty & Abhirup Datta

  2. Space and Atmospheric Sciences Division, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, 380009, India

    Sumanjit Chakraborty

  3. Institute of Radio Physics and Electronics, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, 700009, India

    Ashik Paul

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  1. Sarvesh Mangla
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Correspondence to Sarvesh Mangla.

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This article is part of the Special Issue on “Indian Participation in the SKA”.

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Mangla, S., Chakraborty, S., Datta, A. et al. Exploring Earth’s ionosphere and its effect on low radio frequency observation with the uGMRT and the SKA. J Astrophys Astron 44, 2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-022-09900-0

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