Statistical Evaluation of the Multi-Frequency GPS Ionospheric Scintillation Observation Data

With the growing overdependence on the widely available Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology, the demand of the secure, reliable and accurate navigation especially for the aviation market has been a major concern of the satellite navigation engineers. The ionospheric scintillation is one of the most dangerous and sophisticated phenomena that not only compromises the accuracy of the receiver's position, velocity and time (PVT) output but also the reliability of receiver's performance in such critical situations. The maximum intensity scintillation occurs after every 11 years on average and, therefore, due to lack of available data, there are not enough practical studies to study this phenomenon. In this paper, we study the strong scintillation data collected during the last strong solar maximum event in 2013 at the Ascension Island. The frequency-to-frequency correlation is selected as an important metric to study the fading signals. The observations and the results discussed in the paper are the significant contributions toward the practical study of real ionospheric scintillation data and, hence, provide a strong ground for the future research.