Prompt derivation of TEC from GEONET data for space weather monitoring in Japan

Continuous monitoring of ionospheric conditions is essential to monitoring and forecasting space weather. The worldwide use of global navigation satellite systems like the Gobal Positioning System (GPS) makes it possible to continuously monitor the total electron content (TEC) of the ionosphere and plasmasphere up to a height of about 20,000 km. We have developed a system for deriving the TEC from GEONET data rapidly and we use the TEC distribution over Japan in the daily operations of the Space Weather Forecast Center at NICT (RWC Tokyo of ISES). Using instrumental biases from a few days before enables us to drastically shorten the processing time for deriving TEC. The latest TEC values (with a delay of about 1 h) are obtained every 3 h, and most of the values are within 2 TEC units of the actual TEC. We have found our system for deriving TEC rapidly to be useful for continuously monitoring the progress of ionospheric storms under any ionospheric conditions, even those under which the usual ionosonde observations are unable to obtain F-region profiles.