Ionospheric Scintillation Measurements During a Minor to Major Storm Event on November 2002 at Scott Base Antarctica

A GPS receiving system has been installed at Scott Base, Antarctica in November 2002 for GPS ionospheric TEC and scintillation measurement as part of the Antarctic research collaboration between Malaysian Antarctic Research Programme and Antarctica New Zealand. The heart of the system consists of Trimble TS5700, a high-performance dual-frequency GPS receiver capable of recording the Carrier to Noise ratio (C/No) of the incoming GPS satellite signals and a Trimble Zephyr Geodetic antenna with sub-millimeter phase center repeatability for enhanced multipath resistance. This paper presents an initial result of ionospheric scintillation measurements at Scott Base during a minor to major storm event between 20th and 22nd November 2002 with sudden storm commencement (S SC) on 21st November 2002. The Kp, Dst, and Ap geomagnetic indices for this storm during SSC are 7, -126 nT, and 38 respectively as reported by the World Data Center (WDC) and Australian IPS. Measurement results show that the scintillation activities are in good agreement with the WDC data and indicate a pronounced phase scintillation activity during the recovery phase by factor of 1.8 than that of the sudden commencement for this particular storm event. The pronounced scintillation activity during the recovery phase conformed to the other reports published in the open literature