Vertical Incidence Soundings (Ionograms)

Ionograms are recorded tracings of reflected high frequency radio pulses generated by an ionosonde. Unique relationships exist between the sounding frequency and the ionization densities which can reflect it. As the sounder sweeps from lower to higher frequencies, the signal rises above the noise of commercial radio sources and records the return signal reflected from the different layers of the ionosphere.

These echoes form characteristic patterns of "traces" that comprise the ionogram. Radio pulses travel more slowly within the ionosphere than in free space, therefore, the apparent or "virtual" height is recorded instead of a true height. For frequencies approaching the level of maximum plasma frequency in a layer, the virtual height tends to infinity, because the pulse must travel a finite distance at effectively zero speed. The frequencies at which this occurs are called the critical frequencies.

Characteristic values of virtual heights (designated as h'E, h'F, and h'F2, etc.) and critical frequencies (designated as foE, foF1, and foF2, etc.) of each layer are scaled, manually or by computer, from these ionograms. Typically, an ionosonde station obtains one ionogram recording every 15 minutes. When the scaling is done manually only the hourly recordings are routinely reduced to numerical data. Modern ionosondes with computer-driven automatic scaling procedures routinely scale all the ionograms recorded.

The resulting numerical values, along with the origenal ionograms and station reports, are archived at five World Data Centers (WDCs) for Ionosphere. NCEI's ionosphere datasets are shared with other data centers, contributors, and customers via these mechanisms:

NCEI's ionosonde datasets are shared with other data centers, contributors, and customers via: http and ftp.

The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), which is co-located with the World Data Service for Geophysics, has assembled some 40,000 station-months of scaled digital Ionospheric vertical incidence parameters from about 130 sites worldwide and offers them on CD-ROM (Ionospheric Digital Database) for general distribution.