Effects Of Equatorial Ionospheric Scintillation For GNSS Based Positioning In Aviation

Abstract

The development of operational ICAO Space Weather Center to support aviation community has made significant progress during the last two years, resulting in the start of a continuous service to ICAO on 07. November 2019. Although this service is recently the most advanced space weather service in terms of operability and space weather forecasting, there is still important research and development ahead to address the need of the different stakeholders and use-cases in the aviation domain. Especially the impact of spatial and temporal ionospheric gradients as caused by small scale ionospheric irregularities or ionospheric storms is a threat for GNSS augmentation systems as well as for onboard GNSS receivers. Strong disturbances are able to produce severe scintillations or even can cause disruption of communication and data links, whereas strong ionospheric plasma gradients may lead to hazardous misleading information for the positioning domain, especially for differential GNSS applications. Here, we investigate the effect of equatorial ionospheric scintillation on the GNSS based positioning in aviation. We focus on the Equatorial region where small scale ionospheric irregularities, like the so called “plasma bubbles” occur frequently. The analysis is based on high rate GNSS data collected during high solar activity from a coordinated measurement campaign at the European (Tenerife) and Asian (Ishigaki) region. Statistical information about the Loss of Lock probability are assessed, which are important information to develop related GNSS models for aviation to improve forecasts/nowcasts alerts for GNSS-related services.