Comparison between automatically and manually scaled ionosphericcharacteristics over Cyprus

The challenge for provision of accurate operational nowcasting and short-term forecasting ionospheric services based on ionogram-derived products has greatly increased during the last decades with a clear future trend to evolve into real time assimilation services. This fact, coupled with internet bandwidth expansion and enhanced capabilities of modern ionosondes to operate on a high time resolution (a significant number of Digisonde ionospheric sounders contributing to GIRO -Global Ionospheric Radio Observatory provides data at 5 min resolution) has significantly increased the demand for reliable and consistent automatic scaling for the purpose of determination of ionospheric characteristics derived from ionograms. This demand has been constantly driving the development and continuous improvement of existing programs in order to provide accurate automatically scaled data. The ARTIST software developed at the University of Lowell, Center for Atmospheric Research, is an automatic scaling program widely used and has undergone several upgrades. This study attempts to quantify the quality of all the key ionospheric characteristics scaled automatically from ionograms from the low to mid latitude Nicosia ionosonde in Cyprus by performing a comparison with manual scaled values.