US Total Electron Content (Vertical and Slant)
Product Archive
The US Total Electron Content (US-TEC) product, which evolved through a collaboration between the
Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the
National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the
National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), and
the
Global Systems Division (GSD), is designed to specify Vertical and Slant TEC over the Continental US (CONUS) in near real-time. The product uses a Kalman Filter data assimilation model.
This technique is driven by data from ground-based Global Positioning System (GPS) dual frequency receivers. The primary data stream comes from the Maritime and Nationwide Differential GPS (M/NDGPS) real time network of stations operated by the US Coast Guard (USCG), and is provided to SWPC by the NGS continuously operating reference stations (CORS) network. Secondary data streams are provided by the
GPS/Met network (meteorological application of GPS data) and the Real Time
IGS (International GNSS Service) network. Currently, there are about 80 CORS, 30 GPS/Met, and 15 IGS stations ingested into the model. This number has been gradually increasing and will be augmented by Federal Aviation Administration/Wide Area Augmentation System (FAA/WAAS) data in the future.
The
Real-Time US-TEC Product is provided by SWPC as part of its mandate to provide real-time monitoring and forecasting of solar and geophysical events. NCEI is the National Archive for the US-TEC product output and the CORS data.
The US-TEC product includes maps over the Continental US (CONUS) of
- the vertical total electron content (TEC)
- an estimate of the uncertainty in the map
- the recent trend based on the departure of the TEC from the previous 10-day average
- ACSII Data files of the vertical and slant path TEC
The slant path data files specify the line-of-sight electron content to the GPS satellites in view at the time. This ionospheric product is designed for estimating the signal delay for single and dual frequency GPS applications. Note that TEC values in regions outside of the CONUS have no data and should be treated with caution.
- US-TEC Product Format (Readme)
- Products for 2013 and 2014 are available online
- Products for earlier years can be requested
- Access to historic
US-TEC notable events prior to the established archive.
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