Analysis on the ionospheric scintillation monitoring performance of ROTI extracted from GNSS observations in high-latitude regions

Abstract

Monitoring ionospheric scintillation on a global scale requires introducing a network of widely distributed geodetic receivers, which call for a special type of scintillation index due to the low sampling rate of such receivers. ROTI, as a scintillation index with great potential being applied in geodetic receivers globally, lacks extensive verification in the high-latitude region. Taking the phase scintillation index (σϕ) provided by ionospheric scintillation monitoring receivers as the reference, this paper analyses data collected at 8 high-latitude GNSS stations to validate the performance of ROTI statistically. The data is evaluated against 4 parameters: 1, the detected daily scintillation occurrence rate; 2, the ability to detect the daily occurrence pattern of ionospheric scintillation; 3, the correlation between the detected scintillation and the space weather parameters, including the 10.7 cm solar flux, Ap, the H component of longitudinally asymmetric and polar cap north indices; 4, the overall distribution of the scintillation magnitude. Results reveal that the scintillation occurrence rates, the occurrence patterns of ionospheric scintillations and the correlations provided by ROTI are generally consistent with those given by σϕ, particularly in the middle-high-latitude region. However, the analysis on the distribution of σϕ for different ranges of ROTI shows ROTI cannot achieve accurate scintillation monitoring at the epoch level in all selected stations. The main outcomes of this paper are of importance in guiding the reasonable application area of ROTI and developing a high-latitude ionospheric scintillation model based on geodetic receivers.