METHOD OF DETERMINING POSITION OF EPICENTRAL AREA OF SOURCE AND PROPAGATION SPEED OF TRAVELLING IONOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES Russian patent published in 2015 - IPC G01S5/00 G01S13/95 

FIELD: physics.

SUBSTANCE: method of determining the position of the epicentral area of a source and the propagation speed of travelling ionospheric disturbance (TID) includes: receiving electromagnetic signals from a group of spacecraft using a network of time-synchronised navigation receivers spaced apart on the surface of the Earth; transmitting the received data to a processing centre with a processor-based operator's personal computer with an information display device, where: the transmission time of electromagnetic signals from each spacecraft to each navigation receiver is calculated; pseudo-positioning characteristics of the navigation receivers are calculated; errors and changes in positioning errors of the navigation receivers are calculated; the transmission time of the PID front is determined, wherein: the time of receiving a signal on transmission of the PID front is established separately for each navigation receiver and is determined from the time of appearance, within a few seconds, of a combination of alternating-sign extrema of the positioning errors thereof; the propagation speed of the PID is determined by averaging the travelling velocities of the PID between pairs of any three pre-selected navigation receivers, and the position of the epicentral area of the PID source is determined from the area of intersection of lines, the direction of which is determined by the vectors of the averaged velocities, obtained for each of the three pre-selected navigation receivers.

EFFECT: high accuracy and reliability of determining the propagation speed of travelling ionospheric disturbances and the position of the epicentral area of the source of the travelling ionospheric disturbances.

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