Ionospheric scintillations: Indices and modeling

This paper presents a review of the ionosphere scintillation characteristics recorded at low and high latitudes. The European Space Agency (ESA) MONITOR database has been used to support the analysis. We review in particular the different indices and the values recorded by the different kinds of receivers deployed during the measurement campaign. The climatology of the scintillation occurrences and their dependencies are presented on global maps. At low latitudes, together with the most used scintillation indices, additional parameters have been investigated, such as the time and frequency coherences and the fades and interfade time duration. These additional parameters have been obtained through an analysis of the raw data files recorded on extreme scintillation events. At high latitudes, the different nature of the scintillations recorded is analyzed and compared with the low-latitude case. The last section of the paper shows a comparison between modeling and measured results for a 1-month period at low latitudes.