Evaluation of the Impact of Ionospheric Asymmetry on GNSS Radio Occultation Inversion Products using NeQuick and IRI

‘Onion-peeling’ algorithm is a very common technique used to invert Radio Occultation (RO) data in the ionosphere. Because of the implicit assumption of spherical symmetry for the electron density distribution in the ionosphere, the standard Onion-peeling algorithm could give erroneous concentration values in the retrieved electron density profile. In particular, this happens when strong horizontal ionospheric electron density gradients are present, like for example in the Equatorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA) region during high solar activity periods. In this work, using simulated RO TEC data computed by means of the NeQuick2 and IRI2012 ionospheric electron density models and ideal RO geometries, we tried to formulate and evaluate an asymmetry level indicator for quasi-horizontal radio occultation observations. This asymmetry index is based on the electron density variation that a ray may experience along its propagation path (satellite to satellite link) in a RO event. This index is dependent on the occultation geometry and on the azimuth of the occultation plane. Our qualitative assessment shows a good correlation between our asymmetry index and Onion-peeling retrieval errors; i.e. errors produced by Onionpeeling in the retrieval of NmF2 and VTEC are larger at the geographical locations where our asymmetry index indicates high asymmetry in the ionosphere.