A new ionospheric tomography model combining pixel-based and function-based models

Considering the limitations of current single pixel-based and function-based computerized ionospheric tomography (CIT) models, this paper proposes a new tomography model - COMBI, which combines these two models. COMBI model is able to reconstruct the three dimensional distribution of electron density with fewer parameters, and easy to compute, as well as very convenient to use. Through experiments with simulated data and measured data, it is verified that the new COMBI model not only can better describe refine structure of ionospheric electron density, but also is superior to these two pixel-based and function-based CIT models in application.