Inferring the Horizontal Speed of an Ionospheric Irregularity From a Single GPS Scintillation Receiver at High Latitudes

Abstract

We propose a new technique to infer the horizontal speed of ionospheric irregularity at high latitudes from the refractive components of the global positioning system (GPS) L1 (1575.42 MHz) and L2 (1227.60 MHz) carrier phases using only a single ground‐based receiver that can log measurements at 50–100 Hz. The test data at Jang Bogo Station (geographic: 74.6°S and 164.2°E; geomagnetic: 77.2°S) in Antarctica and at Sachs Harbor (geographic: 71.9°N and 234.7°E; geomagnetic: 75.6°N) in the Arctic were analyzed for a one‐year period in 2019. The results were compared with data from ground‐based radar observations, the Vertical Incidence Pulsed Ionospheric Radar (VIPIR) in Antarctica and the Canadian Advanced Digital Ionosonde (CADI) in the Arctic, which measures the ion drift velocity at the apex. Although it is difficult to directly compare GPS and radar measurements due to the steep gradient of fast plasma motion in narrow regions at high latitudes, the probability density of the ionospheric irregularity speeds from the two different instruments were consistent with the correlation coefficients of 0.81 and 0.85 in the Southern and Northern hemispheres.