Instantaneous Ionospheric Scintillation Mapping over the East African Region by use of GPS Derived Amplitude Scintillation Proxy

Abstract

Ionospheric scintillation activity over the East African region is often monitored using measurements from the SCIntillation Network Decision Aid (SCINDA) receivers. Many of the SCINDA receivers over East Africa are currently not archiving data and therefore a large part of the region remain un sampled. We investigated the possibility to use dual frequency receivers of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) network for scintillation mapping. A proxy for amplitude scintillation was first derived by scaling the rate of change of total electron content index (ROTI). The proxy was validated against S4 derived from nearly collocated SCINDA receivers over the region. A good correlation was observed between the proxy and S4. The proxy was then used to map the occurrence of amplitude scintillation over East Africa based on semivariogram modeling and Kriging interpolation technique. The results indicate that the S4 values had a good positive correlation with *Corresponding author: E-mail: emirant.amabayo@gmail.com; Amabayo et al.; AJR2P, 4(2): 6-20, 2021; Article no.AJR2P.66815 the simulated S4p from the Kriging interpolation. This observation suggests that data from the dual frequency receivers of GNSS may be used to map scintillation over East Africa. These maps can in turn be used to study the evolution of ionospheric scintillation patterns over the region.

A new approach for the generation of real-time GNSS low-latitude ionospheric scintillation maps

“…Space Weather Space Clim. 2023, 13, 18 from some PRNs (satellite identifier number), like Amabayo et al (2021), Hamel et al (2014, Kieft et al (2014), andKoulouri (2022). The exception was Vani (2018), but even this one did not perform such an extensive set of evaluations.…”

“…Vani (2018) employed a similar approach, with modified pre-processing options to generate these maps. Other works propose the generation of scintillation maps for different parts of the globe mainly by approaches based on kriging interpolation (Hamel et al, 2014;Kieft et al, 2014;Amabayo et al, 2021). All the cited approaches result in a temporal sequence of maps using or not a priori IPP samples from a previous map of the sequence.…”