Spatial Characterization of High Latitude Ionosphere Scintillations

Jun Wang, Yu Morton, Qihou Zhou, Wouter Pelgrum

Abstract:	The objective of this paper is to analyze the spatial coherence of high latitude scintillation based on a GNSS receiver array measurements from Gakona, Alaska. Ultimately, the results will be used to derive plasma drift velocity and construct ionosphere tomography. Our recent study has demonstrated that an adaptive periodogram technique can generate high resolution time-frequency information for the scintillation signal carrier phase. One of the major challenges is to distinguish scintillation effects from background multipath and receiver oscillator induced carrier phase errors. In this study, scintillation data obtained from the high latitude receiver array since 2010 are examined. L1 and L2 carrier phase differencing of the same satellite signal is performed to eliminate oscillator-induced effects. Multipath effects are separated from scintillation events based on their spectral distributions. An adaptive periodogram technique is then applied to the carrier phase differences containing scintillation events to generate accurate scintillation event starting time, ending time, and spectral distributions. These results are further used to compute plasma drift velocities during the scintillation. Plasma drift velocities measured by the SuperDARN radar at Kodiak, Alaska are used to validate the results and demonstrated the feasibility of using GPS array to derive plasma drift velocity during ionosphere scintillations.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 25th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2012) September 17 - 21, 2012 Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, TN
Pages:	3459 - 3464
Cite this article:	Wang, Jun, Morton, Yu, Zhou, Qihou, Pelgrum, Wouter, "Spatial Characterization of High Latitude Ionosphere Scintillations," Proceedings of the 25th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2012), Nashville, TN, September 2012, pp. 3459-3464.
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