Assessment of the 2022 Hunga-Tonga Volcanic Eruption’s Impact on the Ionosphere in the Chinese Region through Tomography

Ionospheric electron density monitoring is of great significance for positioning and navigation, communication technology and space weather research. To alleviate the ill-posed problem of ionospheric electron density inversion caused by sparse and unevenly distributed stations, the DCS-PCA (Dynamic Compressive Sensing-Principal Component Analysis) ionospheric tomography method is used in the paper. This method is a real-time data-driven tomographic method based on compressive sensing and fusion of measurement data. This paper focuses on investigating the influence of the 2022 Hunga-Tonga volcanic eruption on the ionosphere in the Chinese region. The GPS navigation observations were collected from 130 stations within the Qianxun Ground-Based Augmentation System. The constructed ionospheric electron density model demonstrates the DCS-PCA method’s ability to capture the spatiotemporal evolution of the ionosphere during the volcanic eruption. In the ionospheric tomography model, equatorial plasma bubbles were observed in East and Southeast Asia following volcanic waves, leading to reduced electron density, consistent with the reference. The ionospheric tomographic model in this study possesses quasi-real-time capability, high efficiency, and sparse station adaptability, providing a new tomographic solution for ionospheric monitoring.