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

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 sigma phi ${\sigma }_{\phi }$ 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 sigma phi ${\sigma }_{\phi }$ 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.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a new method to extract the phase scintillation index from each GNSS carrier with 1s-sampling-interval, aiming to achieve global-scale ionospheric scintillation monitoring.