Scintillation measurements at Bahir Dar during the high solar activity phase of solar cycle 24

Kurzfassung

Small scale ionospheric disturbances may cause severe radio scintillations of signals transmitted from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Consequently, small scale plasma irregularities may heavily degrade the performance of current GNSS such as GPS, GLONASS or Galileo. This paper presents analysis results obtained primarily from two high rate GNSS receiver stations designed and operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in cooperation with the Bahir Dar University (BDU) at 11.6°N; 37.4°E. Both receivers collect up to 50 Hz sampled raw data from which characteristic scintillation parameters such as the S4 index are deduced. This paper gives a first overview about the measurement setup and the observed scintillation events over Bahir Dar in 2015. Both stations are closely located in east west direction which allows to estimate the zonal drift velocity and spatial dimension of equatorial ionospheric plasma irregularities. Therefore the lag times of moving electron density irregularities and scintillation patterns are derived by applying the cross correlation analysis to high rate measurements of the slant total electron content (sTEC) along both radio links between a GPS satellite and both receivers and to associated signal power, respectively. Finally, the drift velocity is derived from the estimated lag time taking into account the geometric constellation of both receiving antennas and the observed GPS satellites.

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• Scintillation measurements at Bahir Dar during the high solar activity phase of solar cycle 24. (deposited 02 Dez 2016 11:48) [Gegenwärtig angezeigt]
  • Scintillation measurements at Bahir Dar during the high solar activity phase of solar cycle 24. (deposited 02 Dez 2016 15:41)
    • Scintillation measurements at Bahir Dar during the high solar activity phase of solar cycle 24. (deposited 14 Feb 2017 16:48)