A Filtering Method Developed to Improve GNSS Receiver Data Quality in the CALIBRA Project

Abstract

To study ionospheric scintillation on L-band radio signals, it is nowadays typical to acquire data with GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) receivers working at high frequency sampling rate (50-100 Hz). When dealing with such data, it is common to consider the contribution coming solely from observations at elevation angles, calculated from the receiver to the selected satellite, above an arbitrary threshold, typically 15-30°. Filtering out measurements made at low elevation angles helps keeping a high SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) and eliminating non-ionospheric related effects, such as multipath. The downside of that well consolidated method is a reduction of the field of view spanned by the GNSS receiver antenna, and, if it is the case, of the whole network. This is not crucial for dense networks or well covered areas, but it can be in the case of not well covered regions, for logistics (e.g. forests, deserts, etc.) and/or environmental reasons (e.g. oceans). The loss of information in many applications could be meaningful. In this paper, we present a method to filter out spurious data based on an “outliers analysis” able to efficiently remove multipath affected measurements, reducing the data loss from 35-45% to 10-20%. It is based upon the Ground Based Scintillation Climatology (GBSC) and the station characterization based upon GBSC [5] is applied to the CIGALA1/ CALIBRA2 network in Brazil. The research shown herein was carried out in the context of the CALIBRA (http://www.calibra-ionosphere.net) project and exploits the CIGALA/ CALIBRA network in Brazil, to which the method was applied, enlarging the field of view and, then, improving the capability of inferring the dynamics of the low latitude ionosphere.