We focus on reconstructing the topside ionosphere and plasmasphere and assimilating the space-based Global Navigation Satellite System slant total electron content (STEC) measurements with an ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We present methods for realizing the propagation step without a physical model. We investigate the capability of our estimations to reconstruct independent STEC and electron density measurements. We compare the EnKF approach with SMART+ and the 3D ionosphere model NeQuick.

We extend the kriging of the ionospheric electron density with slant total electron content (STEC) measurements based on a spatial covariance to kriging with a spatial–temporal covariance and develop a novel tomography approach by gradient-enhanced kriging assimilating STEC and F2 layer characteristics. The methods are cross-validated with independent measurements and point out the potential compensation for the often observed bias in the estimation of the F2 layer peak height.