Multi-GNSS for Ionospheric Scintillation Studies

Abstract:

GNSS have been widely used for ionospheric monitoring. We anticipate over 160 GNSS satellites broadcasting 400 signals by 2023, nearly double the number today. With their well-defined signal structures, high spatial density and spectral diversity, GNSS offers low cost and distributed passive sensing of ionosphere effects.

There are, however, many challenges to utilize GNSS resources to characterize and forecast ionospheric scintillation. Originally intended for navigation purposes, GNSS receivers are designed to filter out nuisance effects due to ionosphere effects. GNSS measurements are plagued with errors from multipath, oscillator jitters, processing artifacts, and neutral atmosphere effects. Strong scintillation events are often characterized by turbulent structures in ionosphere, causing simultaneous deep amplitude fading and abrupt carrier phase changes. The combined weak signal and high carrier dynamics imposes conflicting requirements for GNSS receiver design. Therefore, GNSS receivers often experience cycle slips and loss of lock of signals during strong scintillation events. High quality, raw GNSS signals bearing space weather signatures and robust receiver algorithms designed to capture these signatures are needed in order for GNSS to be a reliable and useful agent for scintillation monitoring and forecasting.

Our event-driven, reconfigurable data collection system is designed to achieve this purpose. To date, our global network has collected ~150TB of raw GNSS data during space weather events. A suite of novel receiver processing algorithms has been developed by exploitating GNSS spatial, frequency, temporal, and constellation diversity to process signals experiencing challenging scintillation impact. The algorithms and data have advanced our understanding of scintillation impact on GNSS, lead to more robust receiver technologies, and enabled high spatial and temporal resolution depiction of ionosphere responses to solar and geomagnetic conditions.

This presentation will summarize progress and current state of the event-driven multi-GNSS data collection systems, GNSS receiver architectures designed to capture and preserve scintillation features, and scintillation effects observations derived from this unique set of data and processing algorithms.