Impact of Tropospheric Scintillation Models on Earth-Space Path in Southwest, Nigeria

Much investigative studies have been performed over the years on electromagnetic wave signals being attenuated by rain, cloud, gas and tropospheric scintillation. This paper present the impact of tropospheric scintillation on earth-space path in southwest, Nigeria at 12.245 GHz. Twenty-four months of scintillation data from ASTRA 2E/2F/2G on latitude 6.7 degrees N and longitude 3.23 degrees E for two years (2015-2016) were statistically analysed and compare with four existing models. The result reveals that under non-rainy atmosphere, ITU-R model gave the lowest percentage error of about 1.07%, followed closely by Karasawa model with 1.67%. The work also shows that ITU-R is the best fit model of tropospheric scintillation fade for the study area at 1% of time. A modified ITU-R scintillation fade model was also proposed for the tropical region of Ota and its environs.