Ionogram Scaling: AUTOSCALA autoscaler Version 5

AUTOSCALA is a software to automatically scale the main standard ionospheric characteristics from an ionogram and the associated electron density profile. Initially it was only applied to the ionograms recorded by the AIS-INGV ionosondes, which are not able to record the polarization of the received echo. The main algorithm of AUTOSCALA does not use the polarization tagging. AUTOSCALA 5 produces an improved electron density profile using a model with free parameters (AIP, Adaptive Ionospheric Profiler). The main improvements of AIP concern the better adaptability of the profile and the modeling of the E valley. Initially the parameters are calculated on the basis of the ionospheric characteristics automatically obtained from the ionogram by AUTOSCALA and considering the helio-geophysical conditions. The free parameters are adjusted according to the particular ionogram applying an iterative technique.