Prediction of ionospheric scintillation using neural network over East African region during ascending phase of sunspot cycle 24

Abstract

VHF and GPS-SCINDA receivers located both at Nairobi (36.8°E, 1.3°S) in Kenya and at Kampala (32.57°E, 0.335°N) in Uganda were used to investigate ionospheric scintillation and forecast scintillations of a few hundred meter-scale irregularities associated with equatorial ionospheric irregularities for the period 2011 and 2012. VHF scintillations was characterized by long duration of activity and slow fading that lasted till early morning hours (05:00 LT). Furthermore, different percentage occurrence of scintillations in some months were observed, but found that weak scintillation (0.2<S4⩽0.4) was more dominant throughout the period. The occurrence of scintillations was more dominant in the equinox season than in the solstice season which had the same trend as the sunspot number. The enhancement of pre-midnight scintillations during magnetically disturbed and quiet periods was also observed and found to be seasonal and local time dependent. An attempt was made to develop a model of percentage occurrence of scintillations for the ascending phase of solar cycle 24 using neural network and the modeled data for the occurrence of scintillations was found to match well with original data.