Challenges in real-time generation of scintillation index maps

Abstract

Ionospheric scintillation affects GNSS signals that provide many essential services, making the monitoring of scintillation an important issue. This work presents a system for the real-time acquisition, generation and online dissemination of the S4 scintillation index maps covering Brazil using data from two major networks of GNSS monitoring stations, LISN and INCT. The maps are made using an innovative pre-processing and interpolation scheme. The system is already implemented and tested, being composed of a single real-time server with a database and modules that perform reception from the GNSS stations, data processing, and the online dissemination. All these tasks are executed asynchronously in a pipeline manner using the database as a central hub without any loss of data. The challenges that must be overcome to have real-time capability were: (i) to configure GNSS stations to send S4 data to a real-time server able to (ii) receive S4 data from the GNSS stations, (iii) generate sequences of S4 scintillation maps, and (iv) make these maps available in a web server. The implemented system was able to acquire data from all available stations of the monitoring networks, being robust concerning interruption of connections or different processing times of the tasks.