Ch 31. Ionospheric Effects, Monitoring, and Mitigation Techniques

Chapter Overview: The ionosphere is the upper atmosphere that lies between 80 and 1500 km altitude. It is a weakly ionized plasma bathed in the Earth geomagnetic fields. The state of the ionospheric plasma is affected by solar and magnetospheric events from above, neutral atmospheric activities from below, and complex electrodynamic processes from within. Radio waves such as the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signals propagating through the ionosphere will experience varying levels of absorption, refraction, scattering, and polarization shift. This chapter provides a review of the fundamental properties of the ionosphere that impact satellite navigation signals and PVT solutions. Two types of high impact ionospheric effects are discussed in details: ionospheric refraction and scintillation. Ionospheric refractive effects discussions includes first order group delay and carrier phase advances, TEC estimation techniques and TEC products, and higher order refraction errors. Ionospheric scintillation review focuses on the physics of ionospheric irregularities formation and radio wave propagation through the irregularities, climatology and morphology of scintillation occurrences at high and low latitudes, impact of scintillation on PNT applications such as RTK and PPP, and GNSS receiver carrier tracking algorithms designed to combat strong scintillation.

On this page you can:

• • Get hi-res copies of selected figures from the chapter, for use with attribution.

  • Generate simulated multi-frequency GNSS scintillation data using a physics-based, real scintillation data initiated simulator developed by the authors. Coming soon.

  • Download real, raw IF scintillation data collected by the authors Satellite Navigation and Sensing Lab. Coming soon.

  • Read or contribute to errata, and give feedback through this link: reader inputs