Assessing Ionospheric Scintillation Effects for Future GNSS Radio Occultation Missions

Maryam Najmafshar, Susan Skone

Abstract:	Ionospheric scintillations can compromise performance of Radio Occultation (RO) missions and their measurements to retrieve geophysical parameters (e.g. temperature and pressure). For Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), ionospheric scintillations may induce receiver loss of lock or excessive phase noise and reduce GNSS availability for RO platforms. Alternatively, measurements of scintillated RO signals can be used to derive information about ionospheric irregularities. Real RO data from current missions shows significant degradation in receiver performance during periods of ionospheric scintillation; thus there is a need to investigate and characterize scintillation impact. In this study we use an experimental method to extract scintillation perturbations from real RO missions and then impose them to non-scintillated simulated RO scenarios. Resulting signal contains similar spectral characteristics similar to the original scintillated real data. Simulated high rate IF samples are then used to investigate performance of a typical commercial GNSS receiver under scintillation conditions for RO applications.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 29th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2016) September 12 - 16, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon
Pages:	714 - 724
Cite this article:	Najmafshar, Maryam, Skone, Susan, "Assessing Ionospheric Scintillation Effects for Future GNSS Radio Occultation Missions," Proceedings of the 29th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2016), Portland, Oregon, September 2016, pp. 714-724. https://doi.org/10.33012/2016.14726
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