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Space Diversity Mitigation Effects on Ionospheric Amplitude Scintillation With Basis on the Analysis of C/NOFS Planar Langmuir Probe Data
Author(s) -
Costa Emanoel,
Roddy Patrick A.,
Ballenthin John O.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
radio science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1944-799X
pISSN - 0048-6604
DOI - 10.1029/2020rs007085
Subject(s) - geostationary orbit , scintillation , interplanetary scintillation , ionosphere , longitude , amplitude , remote sensing , physics , satellite , space weather , geodesy , latitude , meteorology , geology , geophysics , optics , plasma , astronomy , detector , coronal mass ejection , quantum mechanics , solar wind
The present contribution applies a modified version of a well‐known weak‐scatter scintillation model to the propagation paths between an Earth station and two geostationary satellites, as they are affected by drifting ionospheric irregularities detected by the planar Langmuir probe onboard the Communications/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite. This study considers one year of data from a limited altitude range, two longitude sectors and frequencies to analyze the mitigation effects from the angular distance between the geostationary satellites on the space diversity gain, considering the statistical distributions of the amplitude scintillation index S 4 . The results indicate that the space diversity gain increases with the angular distance between geostationary satellites. However, once the angular distance between the geostationary satellites reaches a certain limit (approximately 20°), the space diversity gain no longer increases. Additionally, these gains are high at the L1 frequency and less impressive at an Ultra High Frequency (UHF). It is shown that these observations are consistent with the South American and Indian‐Asian equatorial and low‐latitude ionospheric environments, also characterized through the same data and the scintillation formulation.