Detecting Amplitude Scintillations Using C/N0 Differences

Ryan J.R. Thompson, Ediz Cetin and Andrew G. Dempster

Abstract:	Ionospheric scintillation poses a serious source of vulnerability to Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, prompting its study so that it can be modeled, predicted, and its effects on receiver tracking analyzed. In this work a technique is presented that allows for the detection of ionospheric induced amplitude scintillation using the differences of Carrier to Noise Density (C/N0) values between the satellite ground-tracks from stationary GNSS receivers. Amplitude scintillation is typically monitored using specialized GNSS receivers which provide the S4 index in real-time, while the presented technique allows for amplitude scintillation to be monitored using more common receiver observables in post-processing, and can be readily applied to large collections of GNSS observations already archived in RINEX formats. The proposed technique takes advantage of the property that C/N0 values repeat with a satellites ground-track allowing for the effects of multipath, which can make C/N0 a noisy measurement, to be removed. Results are compared with the S4 values from a network of Ionospheric Scintillation Monitoring (ISM) receivers to demonstrate that the proposed technique is effective at detecting moderate amplitude scintillations. It is also shown that it is possible to characterize and differentiate between Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) and space weather effects by looking at the C/N0 values from surrounding GNSS stations to reduce the number of false alarms, depending on what is being monitored.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014) September 8 - 12, 2014 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	1115 - 1125
Cite this article:	Thompson, Ryan J.R., Cetin, Ediz, Dempster, Andrew G., "Detecting Amplitude Scintillations Using C/N0 Differences," Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014), Tampa, Florida, September 2014, pp. 1115-1125.
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