Abstract. We analyze data of ionospheric scintillation in the geographic latitudinal range 44 • -88 • N during the period of October, November and December 2003 as a first step to develop a "scintillation climatology" over Northern Europe. The behavior of the scintillation occurrence as a function of the magnetic local time and of the corrected magnetic latitude is investigated to characterize the external conditions leading to scintillation scenarios. The results shown herein, obtained merging observations from four GISTM (GPS Ionospheric Scintillation and TEC Monitor), highlight also the possibility to investigate the dynamics of irregularities causing scintillation by combining the information coming from a wide range of latitudes. Our findings associate the occurrences of the ionospheric irregularities with the expected position of the auroral oval and ionospheric troughs and show similarities with the distribution in magnetic local time of the polar cap patches. The results show also the effect of ionospheric disturbances on the phase and the amplitude of the GPS signals, evidencing the different contributions of the auroral and the cusp/cap ionosphere.

[1] High-rate sampling data of Global Navigation Satellite Systems ionospheric scintillation acquired by a network of GPS Ionospheric Scintillation and TEC Monitor receivers located in the Svalbard Islands, in Norway and in Antarctica have been analyzed. The aim is to describe the "scintillation climatology" of the high-latitude ionosphere over both the poles under quiet conditions of the near-Earth environment. For climatology we mean to assess the general recurrent features of the ionospheric irregularities dynamics and temporal evolution on long data series, trying to catch eventual correspondences with scintillation occurrence. In spite of the fact that the sites are not geomagnetically conjugate, long series of data recorded by the same kind of receivers provide a rare opportunity to draw a picture of the ionospheric features characterizing the scintillation conditions over high latitudes. The method adopted is the Ground Based Scintillation Climatology, which produces maps of scintillation occurrence and of total electron content relative variation to investigate ionospheric scintillations scenario in terms of geomagnetic and geographic coordinates, interplanetary magnetic field conditions and seasonal variability. By means of such a novel and original description of the ionospheric irregularities, our work provides insights to speculate on the cause-effect mechanisms producing scintillations, suggesting the roles of the high-latitude ionospheric trough, of the auroral boundaries and of the polar cap ionosphere in hosting those irregularities causing scintillations over both the hemispheres at high latitude. The method can constitute a first step toward the development of new algorithms to forecast the scintillations during space weather events.

Integer ambiguity resolution at a single receiver can be implemented by applying improved satellite products where the fractional-cycle biases (FCBs) have been separated from the integer ambiguities in a network solution. One method to achieve these products is to estimate the FCBs by averaging the fractional parts of the float ambiguity estimates, and the other is to estimate the integer-recovery clocks (IRCs) by fixing the undifferenced ambiguities to integers in advance. In this paper, we theoretically prove the equivalence of the ambiguity-fixed position estimates d from these two methods by assuming that the F Bs ar hard are-dependent and only they are assimilated into the clocks and ambiguities. To ify is equivalence we implement both methods in the PANDA (Position and Navigation Data Analyst) software to process one year of GPS data from a global network of about 350 stations. The mean biases between all daily position estimates derived from these two methods are only 0.2, 0.1 and 0.0 mm, whereas the standard deviations of all position differences are only 1.3, 0.8 and 2.0 mm for the East, North and Up components, respectively. Moreover, the differences of the position repeatabilities are below 0.2 mm on average for all three components. The RMS of the position estimates minus those from the IGS weekly ons for the former method differs by below 0.1 mm on vera e for each component from that for the latter method. Therefore, considering th cogned millimeter-evel precision of current GPS-derived daily positions, these statistics empirically demonstrate the theoretical equivalence of the ambiguity-fixed position estimates derived from these two methods. In practice, we note that the former method is compatible with current official clock-generation methods, whereas the latter method is not, but can potentially lead to slightly better positioning quality.

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Abstract:Integer ambiguity resolution at a single station can be achieved by introducing predetermined uncalibrated phase delays (UPDs) into the float ambiguity estimates of precise point positioning (PPP). This integer resolution technique has the potential of leading to a PPP-RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) model where PPP provides rapid convergence to a reliable centimeter-level positioning accuracy based on an RTK reference network. Nonetheless, implementing this model is technically subject to how rapidly we can fix wide-lane ambiguities, stabilize narrow-lane UPD estimates, and achieve the first ambiguity-fixed solution. To investigate these issues, we used seven days of 1-Hz sampling GPS data at 91 stations across Europe. We find that at least 10 minutes of observations are required for most receiver types to reliably fix about 90% of wide-lane ambiguities corresponding to high elevations, and over 20 minutes to fix about 90% of those corresponding to low elevations. Moreover, several tens of minutes are usually required for a regional network before a narrow-lane UPD estimate stabilizes to an accuracy of far better than 0.1 cycles. Finally, for hourly data, ambiguity resolution can significantly improve the accuracy of epoch-wise position estimates from 13.7, 7.1 and 11.4 cm to 0.8, 0.9 and 2.5 cm for the East, North and Up components, respectively, but a few tens of minutes is required to achieve the first ambiguity-fixed solution. Therefore, from the timeliness aspect, our PPP-RTK model currently cannot satisfy the critical requirement of instantaneous precise positioning where ambiguity-fixed solutions have to be achieved within at most a few seconds. However, this model can still be potentially applied to some nearreal-time remote sensing applications, such as the GPS meteorology.