Abstract
Ionospheric scintillation refers to rapid and random fluctuations in radio frequency signal intensity and phase, which occurs more frequently and severely at high latitudes under strong solar and geomagnetic activity. As one of the most challenging error sources affecting Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), scintillation can significantly degrade the performance of GNSS receivers, thereby leading to increased positioning errors. This study analyzes Global Positioning System (GPS) scintillation data recorded by two ionospheric scintillation monitoring receivers operational, respectively, in the Arctic and northern Canada during a geomagnetic storm in 2019. A novel approach is proposed to calculate 1-s scintillation indices. The 1-s receiver tracking error variances are then estimated, which are further used to mitigate the high latitude scintillation effects on GPS Precise Point Positioning. Results show that the 1-s scintillation indices can describe the signal fluctuations under scintillation more accurately. With the mitigation approach, the 3D positioning error is greatly reduced under scintillation analyzed in this study. Additionally, the 1-s tracking error variance achieves a better performance in scintillation mitigation compared with the previous approach which exploits 1-min tracking error variance estimated by the commonly used 1-min scintillation indices. This work is relevant for a better understanding of the high latitude scintillation effects on GNSS and is also beneficial for developing scintillation mitigation tools for GNSS positioning.
Highlights
When radio frequency (RF) signals pass through the plasma density irregularities in the ionosphere, their intensity and phase may suffer from rapid and random fluctuations, a phenomenon known as ionospheric scintillation
In order to compare the performance of tracking error variance weighting in scintillation mitigation by, respectively, exploiting the 1-min and 1-s scintillation index, kinematic Precise Point Positioning (PPP) using the settings summarized in Table 3 is recalculated from Day of year (DOY) 241 to 246 at LYB0 and SAC stations, with a sampling interval of 60 s for code and carrier phase measurements
This may be due to the fact that under weak or moderate phase scintillation, the phase fluctuations are relatively stable and 1-min scintillation indices are comparable to the 1-s indices, which is shown in Fig. 8, the 1-min tracking error variance achieves a better representative of the measurement noise level over the interval, which results in comparable results for the scintillation mitigation
Summary
When radio frequency (RF) signals pass through the plasma density irregularities in the ionosphere, their intensity and phase may suffer from rapid and random fluctuations, a phenomenon known as ionospheric scintillation. Signal quality and receiver performance of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), such as Global Positioning System (GPS), GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), can be adversely affected under scintillation (Skone et al 2001; Chen et al 2008; Sreeja et al 2012), thereby leading to increased positioning errors. This usually leads to a worse accuracy of GNSS global broadcast ionospheric delay correction model for single-frequency users, which results in greater positioning error (Klobuchar 1987; Prieto-Cerdeira et al 2014; Yuan et al 2019).
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