Modelling ionospheric scintillation under the crest of the equatorial anomaly

Abstract

WAM is realized making use of the plasma density data collected via the retarding potential analyser on board the Dynamics Explorer 2 spacecraft, capable to model the scintillation climatology over the northern hemisphere high latitude ionosphere. More recently, WAM has been tuned to model the ionospheric scintillations also over the equatorial latitudes. The effort has been done to support the CIGALA (Concept for Ionospheric Scintillation Mitigation for Professional GNSS in Latin America) project in the assessment of the scintillations climatology over Latin America. The concept of the new release of WAM is the same already adopted for the high latitudes: the in situ measurements, supplemented with an ionospheric model and with the irregularity anisotropy model, are treated to describe the morphology of scintillation, provided a suitable propagation model is used. Significant differences have been included in the low latitudes release to account for the anisotropy of the irregularities and for strong scattering regime. The paper describes the new WAM formulation and presents comparisons of the model predictions with the actual measurements collected in Brazil.