Total Electron Content above South-America during the recent Total Solar Eclipse

During the last years the Southern-American continent witnessed two total Solar eclipses, which have been investigated in [1] by looking at the ionospheric response with ionosondes and obtained a match with the SUPIM-INPE model. In this study, we propose to deepen this analysis with 2D maps of the Total Electron Content (TEC) from GNSS observations. The wide seismologic Chilean network contains dozens of GNSS receivers that provide dual-frequency GNSS measurement with high temporal resolution (<1min). From this information, we deduce TEC for the Chilean ionosphere with good spatial resolution. We built a new code that computes TEC based on several algorithms that reconstruct the signal from the RINEX files generated at the GNSS receivers. This code takes particular care of the cycle-slips that are common when satellites elevation is low and compute biases of the receivers. We study the spatio-temporal variation of 2D TEC patterns around the time of the eclipse, with particular emphasis on the passage of the shadow of the Moon in the South-American ionosphere. [1] M. MartinezLedesma et al., JGR Space Physics, 2020JA028625, 2020. This work was supported by the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) under Fondecyt Award No. 1190703 (J.A.V.), Fondecyt Award No. 1190662 (J.R.), and CEDENNA through "Financiamiento Basal para Centros Cientificos y Tecnologicos de Excelencia" FB0807 (J.R. and J.A.V.). We also thank the support of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award numbers FA9550-20-1-0189 (P.M., S.B., and J.A.V.).