Estimating ionospheric scintillation S4 from ROTI over the Indian region using GPS data

Ionospheric irregularities can be assessed through the rate of change of total electron content (TEC) indicated by ROT, which can be derived from a dual-frequency GNSS receiver at a time interval of 5 min, Pi et al (1997). However, most of the GNSS receivers do not provide scintillation data due to their high sampling rate of at least 50 Hz thus ROTI can be used as a proxy for scintillations. In most of the past studies, it is shown there is some correlation between ROTI and S_4. The significant capturing of the scintillation patch is validated by plotting the temporal variation of S₄ for all the 25 stations under GAGAN for the year 2014.

GPS data has been used to statistically study the ionospheric scintillations, applications of which are beneficial in radio communication. The data used is GAGAN data to make robust conclusions on the scintillation indices.