Sensitivity of tropospheric scintillation models to the accuracy of radiosonde data

The increase of the frequency of Earth-Low Earth Orbit satellite links leads to the development of new propagation models in order to accurately characterize the propagation channel. Space-time models are developed for tropospheric attenuation and scintillation but their validation is difficult in the absence of measured data. The verification of scintillation models can be performed worldwide against models using radiosonde data. The sensitivity of the propagation model to measurement errors in radiosonde data is critical. This paper shows an analysis of the effect of radiosonde measurement errors on the refractive index structure constant, which is the main parameter used in the radiosonde scintillation models, and on the scintillation variance complementary cumulative distribution (CCDF). It is shown that the CCDF is mostly sensitive to errors on temperature so that temperature measurements have to be carefully checked before scintillation modelling.