Reconstruction of the vertical electron density profile based on vertical TEC using the simulated annealing algorithm

•A new method is proposed to reconstruct electron density using GPS-TEC.•The QPS model is applied in this technique.•The simulated annealing algorithm is applied in this technique.

This paper presents a new method to reconstruct the vertical electron density profile based on vertical Total Electron Content (TEC) using the simulated annealing algorithm. The present technique used the Quasi-parabolic segments (QPS) to model the bottomside ionosphere. The initial parameters of the ionosphere model were determined from both International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) (Bilitza et al., 2014) and vertical TEC (vTEC). Then, the simulated annealing algorithm was used to search the best-fit parameters of the ionosphere model by comparing with the GPS-TEC. The performance and robust of this technique were verified by ionosonde data. The critical frequency (foF2) and peak height (hmF2) of the F2 layer obtained from ionograms recorded at different locations and on different days were compared with those calculated by the proposed method. The analysis of results shows that the present method is inspiring for obtaining foF2 from vTEC. However, the accuracy of hmF2 needs to be improved in the future work.