Simulating Ionosphere Scintillation Effects. Potential Applications for Future Earth Observation Missions

In real soundings of the Earth’s atmosphere, it has been found that the phase and amplitude of the signal received undergo strong oscillations at altitudes above the neutral atmosphere and below the Elayer of the ionosphere. This ionospheric scintillation effect is a consequence of multipath propagation resulting from inhomogeneities in the refractivity field of the ionosphere. Ionospheric scintillations can become a problem when processing radio occultation measurements to retrieve geophysical parameters (e.g. temperature and pressure), particularly when trying to achieve high accuracies in the retrieved profiles. Therefore, the impact of ionospheric scintillation effects needs to be carefully valuated. Current ionospheric scintillation models are calibrated empirically. Thus, their applicability to different radio frequencies, scintillation conditions and geometric configurations is not straightforward. We have developed a method to simulate ionospheric scintillation effects on radio occultation measurements. The flexibility of the model presented allows testing many different configurations. The model can be useful in the remote sensing field for assessing radiowave propagation effects through a strongly perturbed ionosphere. It can also be used to evaluate the performance of scintillation mitigation techniques, in the context of satellite based navigation systems.