Influence of different types of ionospheric disturbances on GPS signals at polar latitudes

• Main Authors: Belakhovsky, Vladimir B., Jin, Yaqi, Miloch, Wojciech J.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Ny-Ålesund; Svalbard; EISCAT; Ny Ålesund; Skibotn
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-2020-93; https://angeo.copernicus.org/preprints/angeo-2020-93/

The comparative research of the influence of different types of auroral particle precipitation and polar cap patches (PCP) on the GPS signals disturbances in the polar ionosphere was done. For this purpose, we use the GPS scintillation receivers at Ny-Ålesund and Skibotn, operated by the University of Oslo. The presence of the auroral particle precipitation and polar cap patches was determined by using data from the EISCAT 42 m radar on Svalbard. The optical aurora observations in 557.7 nm, 630.0 nm spectrum lines on Svalbard were used as well for the detection of ionospheric disturbances. The cusp identification was done with using SuperDARN (Hankasalmi) data. We consider about 150 events when the simultaneous EISCAT 42 m and GPS data were available for the 2010–2017 years, in paper we present in detail only typical examples describing the overall picture. It was considered the dayside/cusp precipitation, substorm precipitations, daytime and nighttime PCP, precipitation associated with the interplanetary shock wave arrival. Cusp phase scintillations are lower than dayside PCP scintillations. We demonstrate that substorm-associated precipitations (even without PCP) can lead to a strong GPS phase (σ ϕ ) scintillations up to ~2 radians which is much stronger than those usually produced by other types of the considered ionosphere disturbances. At the same PCPs can lead to stronger ROT (rate of total electron content) variations. So our observations suggest that the substorms and PCPs, being different types of the high-latitude disturbances, lead to the development of different types and scales of ionospheric irregularities.