C/NOFS: a Mission to Forecast Scintillations

Specification and forecasting of scintillations in communication/navigation links: current status and future plans

The need to nowcast and forecast scintillation for the support of operational systems has been recently identified by the interagency National Space Weather Program. This issue is addressed in the present paper in the context of nighttime irregularities in the equatorial ionosphere that cause intense amplitude and phase scintillations of satellite signals in the VHF/UHF range of frequencies and impact satellite communication, Global Positioning System navigation, and radar systems. Multistation and multifrequency satellite scintillation observations have been used to show that even though equatorial scintillations vary in accordance with the solar cycle, the extreme day-to-day variability of unknown origin modulates the scintillation occurrence during all phases of the solar cycle. It is shown that although equatorial scintillation events often show correlation with magnetic activity, the major component of scintillation is observed during magnetically quiet periods. In view of the day-to-day variability of the occurrence and intensity of scintillating regions, their latitude extent, and their zonal motion, a regional specification and short-term forecast system based on real-time measurements has been developed. This system, named the Scintillation Network Decision Aid, consists of two latitudinally dispersed stations, each of which uses spaced antenna scintillation receiving systems to monitor 250-MHz transmissions from two longitudinally separated geostationary satellites. The scintillation index and zonal irregularity drift are processed on-line and are retrieved by a remote operator on the Internet. At the operator terminal the data are combined with an empirical plasma bubble model to generate three-dimensional maps of irregularity structures and two-dimensional outage maps for the region.

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Equatorial scintillation and systems support

[1] This paper presents statistical analysis of arctic auroral oval ionospheric scintillation events during the current solar maximum based on high-rate Global Positioning System data collected in Gakona, Alaska (62.39°N, 145.15°W) from August 2010 to March 2013. The objective is to gain a better understanding of the climatology and morphology of ionospheric scintillation in high-latitude regions. A scintillation event filter, multipath identification procedures, and other processes are applied to exclude nonscintillation related signal intensity and phase fluctuation and to extract scintillation events with S4 index above 0.12 and phase sigma above 6° from over 657 days of data. A total of over 5800 scintillation events were identified; most of them show phase fluctuations, only 10% of the phase fluctuations are accompanied by weak amplitude scintillation. Based on the occurrence time, signal direction of arrival, intensity, and duration of these scintillation events and the solar and geomagnetic activities associated with these events, diurnal, seasonal, spatial, and solar activity dependencies are derived and presented in the paper.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2013RS005259

Characterization of high‐latitude ionospheric scintillation of GPS signals

Ionospheric irregularities and scintillation

One of the main limitations of the modeling work that went into the equatorial section of the Wideband ionospheric scintillation model (WBMOD) was that the data set used in the modeling was limited to two stations near the dip equator (Ancon, Peru, and Kwajalein Island, in the North Pacific Ocean) at two fixed local times (nominally 1000 and 2200). Over the past year this section of the WBMOD model has been replaced by a model developed using data from three additional stations (Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic Ocean, Huancayo, Peru, and Manila, Phillipines; data collected under the auspices of the USAF Phillips Laboratory Geophysics Directorate) which provide a greater diversity in both latitude and longitude, as well as cover the entire day. The new model includes variations with latitude, local time, longitude, season, solar epoch, and geomagnetic activity levels. The way in which the irregularity strength parameter C k L is modeled has also been changed. The new model provides the variation of the full probability distribution function (PDF) of log(C k L) rather than simply the average of log(C k L). This permits the user to specify a threshold on scintillation level, and the model will calculate the percent of the time that scintillation will exceed that level in the user-specified scenario. It will also permit calculation of scintillation levels at a user-specified percentile. A final improvement to the WBMOD model is the implementation of a new theory for calculating S 4 on a two-way channel

Sa. Basu

Papers

An improved model of equatorial scintillation