Extracting an ionospheric phase scintillation index based on 1 Hz GNSS observations and its verification in the Arctic region

The ionospheric scintillation, as one of the astronomical disasters occurring frequently in Arctic regions, poses great challenges to GNSS positioning navigation and timing (PNT) services. This calls for an urgent need in studying and effectively monitoring the scintillation to overcome its adverse impact. With the capability of high frequency sampling, ionospheric scintillation monitoring receivers (ISMR) are usually required to monitor the ionospheric scintillation, but the distribution of ISMR restricts the comprehensive monitoring in larger areas (such as the Arctic region). Therefore, based on GNSS observations with 1 Hz sampling, this paper studies the relevant empirical parameters and methods of extracting the ionospheric scintillation signal from the carrier phase observations by using geodetic detrending, precise point positioning and wavelet transform techniques, to construct a new phase scintillation index, which can be used to monitor the ionospheric scintillation. Its effectiveness and accuracy are verified by 188-day observations from 11 stations provided by the Canadian High Arctic Ionospheric Network (CHAIN). The results show that, compared with the commonly used ROTI index, both the scintillation index proposed in this paper and ROTI can effectively detect the occurrence of ionospheric scintillation, but the scintillation index proposed in this paper has a better correlation with the phase scintillation index given by ISMR, especially during periods with strong ionospheric scintillation, indicating that the proposed scintillation index has better ionospheric scintillation monitoring capability.