The phenomenon of scintillation of radio waves propagating through the ionosphere is reviewed in this paper. The emphasis is on propagational aspects, including both theoretical and experimental results. The review opens with a discussion of the motivation for stochastic formulation of the problem. Based on measurements from in-situ, radar, and propagation experiments, ionospheric irregularities ate found to be characterized, in general, by a power-law spectrum. While earlier measurements indicated a spectral index of about 4, there is recent evidence showing that the index may vary with the strength of the irregularity and possibly a two-component spectrum may exist with different spectral indices for large and small structures. Several scintillation theories including the Phase Screen, Rytov, and Parabolic Equation Method (PEM) are discussed next. Statistical parameters of the signal such as the average signal, scintillation index, rms phase fluctuations, correlation functions, power spectra, distributions, etc., are investigated. Effects of multiple scattering are discussed. Experimental results concerning irregularity structures and signal statics are presented. These results are compared with theoretical predictions. The agreements are shown to be satisfactory in a large measure. Next, the temporal behavior of a transionospheric radio signal is studied in terms of a two-frequency mutual coherence function and the temporal moments. Results including numerical simulations are discussed. Finally, some future efforts in ionospheric scintillation studies in the areas of transionospheric communication and space- and geophysics are recommended.

Radio wave scintillations in the ionosphere

The most recent developments on the propagation of optical beams in a turbulent medium, such as the clear atmosphere, are reviewed. Among the phenomena considered are beam spreading, beam wander, loss of coherence, scintillations, angle-of-arrival variations, and short-pulse effects.

Electromagnetic beam propagation in turbulent media

This paper presents a review of basic theories and recent advances in the studies of wave propagation and scattering in random media. Examples of the random media include the atmosphere, the ocean, and biological media whose characteristics are randomly varying in time and space. The study of electromagnetic, optical, and acoustic waves in such media has become increasingly important in recent years in the areas of communication, detection, and remote-sensing. Topics covered in this paper are divided into "waves in randomly distributed scatterers," "waves in random continua," and "remote-sensing of random media." Transport theory with various approximate solutions and multiple scattering theories are discussed and their relationships are clarified. Included in the analyses are propagation characteristics of intensities, wave fluctuations, pulse propagation and scattering, coherence bandwidth, and coherence time of communication channels through random media. Remote-sensing techniques include recent advances in the use of inversion techniques to deal with ill-posed problems.

Theory and application of wave propagation and scattering in random media

In this survey, we fully review almost all potential ionospheric effects on the performance of space-based radar systems (SBRs), which operate in the ambient ionosphere environment; in particular, we review the use of space-based synthetic aperture radar systems (SARs) for imaging. There are two families of effects involved. One is the effects of the background ionosphere (non-turbulent ionosphere), such as dispersion, group delay, refraction, Faraday rotation, and phase shift. The other is the effects due to ionospheric irregularities, such as refractive index fluctuation, phase perturbation, angle-of-arrival fluctuation, pulse broadening, clutter, and amplitude scintillation. These effects adversely affect SAR imaging in several respects, such as by causing image shift in the range, and degradations of the range resolution, azimuthal resolution, and/or the resolution in height (elevation). We also review ionospheric irregularity characteristics and descriptions, propagation channel statistics, ...

A survey of ionospheric effects on space-based radar

Available observations of ionospheric scintillation are analyzed to evaluate the adequacy of existing models used for the interpretation of scintillation data. The theoretical models are reviewed and the frequency and propagation geometry dependences predicted by the models are compared with the observations. The models were used to construct scintillation occurrence distribution functions which show that scintillation phenomena significantly affect the design of transionospheric radar or communication systems operating at frequencies below 1 GHz. Diversity schemes useful for mitigation of scintillation effects are considered. Mention is made of the geophysical processes thought to be responsible for scintillation.

Ionospheric scintillation

Applying the parabolic approximation, the equations for two-frequency symmetric and antisymmetric mutual intensity functions for waves propagating through a random medium are derived, including the multiple scattering effects. These functions are applied to derive the general formulas for the covariance functions of narrowband pulses. They are used to compute the signal intensities for pulse trains passing through an ionospheric irregularity slab.

Propagation of pulse trains through a random medium

Recent development in the optical scintillation theory has been adapted to the ionospheric geometry in order to study the ionospheric scintillation phenomenon in the presence of multiple scattering Under approximations well satisfied in typical ionospheres for a frequency above about 20 MHz, the first through fourth moment equations have been derived and some analytic solutions given The fourth moment equation has also been solved numerically The numerical results show clearly the occurrence of focusing and saturation phenomena The new multiple-scatter effects are emphasized

A. W. Wernik

Papers

Propagation of pulse trains through a random medium

Effects of multiple scattering on scintillation of transionospheric radio signals