Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa, 2023, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 308-324
A method for assessing the characteristics of small-scale ionospheric inhomogeneities based on GPS monitoring results
V.P. Pashintsev
1 , D.V. Mishin
2 , M.V. Peskov
1 , S.A. Koval
3 1 North-Caucasus Federal University, Stavropol, Russia
2 Povolzhskiy State University of Telecommunications and Informatics, Samara, Russia
3 Military Telecommunications Academy, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Accepted: 22.07.2023
DOI: 10.21046/2070-7401-2023-20-4-308-324
A method has been developed for processing measurement results of the total electronic content of the ionosphere using signals from global navigation satellite systems GPS/GLONASS. It allows to estimate the root mean square of small-scale fluctuations of the total electronic content and the average (characteristic) size of small-scale ionospheric inhomogeneities. The proposed method is based on a modification of the GPStation 6 dual-frequency receiver, which allows to significantly increase the sampling rate of measurements of the total electronic content and reduce the level of instrumental noise, and on the use of a discrete digital Butterworth filter to isolate small-scale fluctuations of the total electronic content. As a result of the analysis of the process of measuring the total electronic content of inhomogeneous ionosphere using GPS/GLONASS signals and a modified dual-frequency receiver GPStation 6, the cutoff frequencies of the bandpass filter used are justified: 1 and 10 Hz. Considering that such a filter should simultaneously have the smoothest possible amplitude-frequency response at transmission frequencies and should not introduce a large group delay into the measurement results, the use of a Butterworth filter of the 6th order is justified. It is shown that the analysis of the autocorrelation function of small-scale fluctuations of total electron content makes it possible to estimate the average size of the small-scale ionospheric inhomogeneities causing such fluctuations at the heights of maximum ionospheric ionization.
Keywords: total electronic content, small-scale fluctuations, root mean square deviation, average size, digital filter, autocorrelation function
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