Characteristics of Ionospheric Scintillation of Geostationary Satellite Signals

In this paper, a statistical analysis is made on ionospheric scintillations by processing the data of geostationary satellite beacon measurements and ionograms at Wuchang (114.4°E, 30.6° N) during May-Aug., 1983 and May-Dec., 1984. The results are (1) at Wuchang, ionospheric scintillations exhibit not only diurnal variations but also seasonal variations. In a year, May-July are months of maximum scintillation activity, but nighttime scintillation is closely associated with wavelike perturbation of Faraday rotation. To some extent, it can be said that ionospheric scintillations as observed at Wuchang belong to the type of middle latitude iono-speric scintillation; (2) it is found that there is a close relationship between indices of scintillation and fluctuations of the Faraday rotation, the correlation coefficient between their occurrences is larger than 0.8. Furthemore, it is estimated that both the correlation coefficient between occurrences nighttime scintillation and spread-F and that between occurrences of daytime scintillation and sporadic E are 0.60 and 0.55, respectively.