The effect of collisions in ionogram inversion

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electron-neutral collisions impact ionogram inversion, showing minimal effect on the ordinary ray but significant influence on the extraordinary ray when combining data for automatic interpretation.

Contribution

It highlights the importance of accounting for electron-neutral collisions in the extraordinary ray to improve ionogram interpretation systems.

Findings

Collisions have a small effect on the group refraction index for the ordinary ray.

Considering collisions improves the interpretation of the extraordinary ray.

Combining ordinary and extraordinary traces requires collision effects for better accuracy.

Abstract

The results of this paper demonstrate how the effect of collisions on the group refraction index is small, when the ordinary ray is considered. If, however, in order to improve the performance of a system for automatic interpretation of ionograms, the information contained in ordinary and extraordinary traces is combined, the effect of collisions between the electrons and neutral molecules should be taken into account for the extraordinary ray.