Ionospheric Phase Scintillation Index Estimation Based on 1 Hz Geodetic GNSS Receiver Measurements by Using Continuous Wavelet Transform

Abstract

The adverse effect of the ionospheric scintillation on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) requires scintillation monitoring on a global scale. Ionospheric Scintillation Monitoring Receivers (ISMR) are usually adopted to monitor scintillation, while they are not suitable for global monitoring due to the 50 Hz data collecting rate, which restricts the distribution. This paper proposes a new method to extract the phase scintillation index from each GNSS carrier with 1s‐sampling‐interval, mainly based on the cycle slip detection, the geodetic detrending and the wavelet transform, in which the optimal symmetry parameter and the time‐bandwidth product are determined with trial calculation. Taken the σϕ ${\sigma }_{\phi }$ index provided by ISMR as the reference, 1‐year observations are utilized to evaluate the scintillation monitoring performance of the extracted index regarding the correlation of the magnitude in each observation arc, the detected daily scintillation occurrence rate, the diurnal variation pattern of the ionospheric scintillation, the correlation between the scintillation occurrence rate and the space weather parameter, and the complementary cumulative distribution of the magnitudes. Compared to the performance of Rate of Total electron content Index, a higher consistency can be achieved between the extracted index and the σϕ ${\sigma }_{\phi }$ index, indicating the rationality of applying the proposed method in monitoring scintillations. The extracted scintillation index can be expected to introduce geodetic receivers operating at 1s‐sampling‐interval into the field of ionospheric scintillation monitoring on a global scale.

Dependencies of GPS Scintillation Indices on the Ionospheric Plasma Drift and Rate of Change of TEC Around the Dawn Sector of the Polar Ionosphere

“…Recently, several researchers have been using proxy scintillation indices developed from the estimated TEC of GNSS observables, the primary one being the rate of TEC (ROT) and rate of TEC index (ROTI) (e.g., Cherniak et al., 2022; Nie et al., 2022; Pi et al., 1997; Zhao et al., 2021). The main reason for deriving these indices is due to unavailability of high cadence data.…”

Asymmetric Ionospheric Fluctuations Over the Circum‐Pacific Regions Following the January 2022 Tonga Volcanic Eruption

“…Hence, in this study, the TEC timeseries trend was eliminated using a quartic polynomial function in the first step. Then the rate of TEC (ROT) was calculated to estimate the plasma irregularities (Zhao et al., 2022). Besides, the ground‐based Digisonde sounders produced by the University of Massachusetts Lowell's Center for Atmospheric Research were also utilized to discover the vertical change of ionospheric plasmas.…”

Comparison of the Performance of the Regression Models in GPS-Total Electron Content Prediction

“…In [7], the nonlinear least square estimation technique is used to allow the TEC modelling for a single-station. In the literature, several studies have focused on comprehension of storm-time behavior of the ionosphere to reduce the influence of ionospheric anomalies and irregularities on global positioning services and to advance the performance of the ionospheric models during the major geomagnetic storms [8,9,10,11]. Also, disturbances and irregularities on TEC due to seismic activity, Solar Flares and solar activity cause the deviations on precise of the satellite navigation and the positioning systems [12,13,14].…”