This paper emphasizes on NavIC's performance in ionospheric studies over the Indian subcontinent region. The study is performed using data of one year (2017-18) at IIT Indore, a location near the northern crest of Equatorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA). It has been observed that even without the individual error corrections, the results are within ±20% of NavIC VTEC estimates observed over the 1 • x 1 • grid of IPP surrounding the GPS VTEC estimates for most of the time.. Additionally, ionospheric response during two distinct geomagnetic storms (September 08 and 28, 2017) at the same location and other IGS stations covering the Indian subcontinent using both GPS and NavIC has also been presented. This analysis revealed similar variations in TEC during the geomagnetic storms of September 2017, indicating the suitability of NavIC to study space weather events along with the ionospheric studies over the Indian subcontinent.

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Intense geomagnetic storms can have a strong impact on the signals (termed as ionospheric scintillations) emitted by any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). The paper reports the first ever scintillations at Indore region on the NavIC signals due to impact of the intense geomagnetic storm event reported on September 8, 2017 at 01:51 and 13:04 UT. The variation of the planetary indices as well as the DST index which dropped to value of −124 nT on September 8, 2017 indicates the occurrence of an intense geomagnetic storm on September 8, 2017. The observations presented are carried out at Indore, which is located at the equatorial anomaly crest. The S4 index measurements of co-located GNSS receiver showed values ≥0.5 on the disturbed day between 15 and 18 UT. The analysis presented clearly signifies the degradation of carrier-noise measurements of NavIC L5 signal during the same time, which in turn affected the positional accuracy of NavIC, an important consideration for performance.

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