Mitigating high latitude ionospheric scintillation effects on GNSS Precise Point Positioning exploiting 1-s scintillation indices

Abstract

Ionospheric scintillation refers to rapid and random fluctuations in radio frequency signal intensity and phase, which occurs more frequently and severely at high latitudes under strong solar and geomagnetic activity. As one of the most challenging error sources affecting Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), scintillation can significantly degrade the performance of GNSS receivers, thereby leading to increased positioning errors. This study analyzes Global Positioning System (GPS) scintillation data recorded by two ionospheric scintillation monitoring receivers operational, respectively, in the Arctic and northern Canada during a geomagnetic storm in 2019. A novel approach is proposed to calculate 1-s scintillation indices. The 1-s receiver tracking error variances are then estimated, which are further used to mitigate the high latitude scintillation effects on GPS Precise Point Positioning. Results show that the 1-s scintillation indices can describe the signal fluctuations under scintillation more accurately. With the mitigation approach, the 3D positioning error is greatly reduced under scintillation analyzed in this study. Additionally, the 1-s tracking error variance achieves a better performance in scintillation mitigation compared with the previous approach which exploits 1-min tracking error variance estimated by the commonly used 1-min scintillation indices. This work is relevant for a better understanding of the high latitude scintillation effects on GNSS and is also beneficial for developing scintillation mitigation tools for GNSS positioning.