Abstract
The paper presents an unprecedented description of the climatology of ionospheric irregularities over the Arctic derived from the longest Global Navigation Satellite Systems data series ever collected for this specific aim. Two TEC and scintillation receivers are working at Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard, NO), the first of which has been installed in late September 2003. They sample the L1 and L2 signals at 50 Hz from all the GPS satellites in view. The receivers monitor an area of about 600 km radius that includes the auroral and cusp/cap regions in the European longitudinal sector. The length of the data series and the privileged site of observation allow describing the Arctic ionosphere along about two solar cycles, from the descending phase of cycle 23 to almost the end of cycle 24. Our analysis results into a detailed assessment of the long-term behaviour of the ionosphere under solar maximum and solar minimum conditions, including several periods of perturbed ionospheric weather caused by unfavourable helio-geophysical conditions. Since November 2015, a multi-constellation GNSS receiver has been deployed in Ny-Ålesund, providing the opportunity to perform the ionospheric climatology from Galileo signals. The results offer realistic features of the high latitude ionosphere that can substantially contribute to the necessary improvements of forecasting models, providing a broad spectrum of ionospheric reactions to different space weather conditions.
Highlights
The interest about the impact of the ionosphere on the propagation of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals is continuously increasing mainly because of the high demand of precise positioning
The climatology of the expected features of Rate Of TEC change (ROT), of its standard deviation (ROT SD) and of the percentage occurrence of σΦ and of S4 as a function of Magnetic Local Time (MLT) and MLAT is obtained by applying the well-established GBSC (Ground Based Scintillation Climatology) technique[4,23,31,32]
To look for the “optimal” phase detrending on long-term data series we have compared the occurrence of σΦ, computed adopting different cut-off frequencies, with the occurrence of S4, by analysing the GPS raw data provided by the PolaRxS along the entire 2016
Summary
Besides the analysis of the long-term variation of the scintillation indices, we consider the climatology of the Rate Of TEC change (ROT). PolaRxS is able to track simultaneously GPS L1CA, L1P, L2C, L2P, L5; GLONASS L1CA, L2CA; Galileo E1, E5a, E5b, E5AltBoc; COMPASS B1, B2; SBAS L130 It provides the same quantities given by the GSV4004, but for all the frequencies and constellations, and the measure of the spectral parameters: spectral slope of the phase Power Spectral Density (p) in the 0.1 to 25 Hz range and the spectral strength of the phase PSD (T) at 1 Hz (60 s). The climatology of the expected features of ROT, of its standard deviation (ROT SD) and of the percentage occurrence of σΦ and of S4 as a function of MLT and MLAT is obtained by applying the well-established GBSC (Ground Based Scintillation Climatology) technique[4,23,31,32]. All the scintillation and ROT data are downloadable from the eSWua website (electronic Space Weather upper atmosphere, www.eswua.ingv.it)
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