A measurement of small-scale features using ionospheric scintillation. Comparison with refractive shift measurements

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that ionospheric scintillation can be effectively measured using the Murchison Widefield Array at low frequencies, revealing small-scale structures and correlating well with refractive shift measurements, especially during active conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of interplanetary scintillation methods to ionospheric studies, enabling measurements of small-scale ionospheric features at 154 MHz.

Findings

Scintillation measurements correlate strongly with refractive shifts (r=0.71).

Small-scale ionospheric structures (~300 m) can be detected at 154 MHz.

Refractive shifts can underestimate small-scale variance during active ionospheric conditions.

Abstract

We present a study of scintillation induced by the mid-latitude ionosphere. By implementing methods currently used in Interplanetary Scintillation studies to measure amplitude scintillation at low frequencies, we have proven it is possible to use the Murchison Widefield Array to study ionospheric scintillation in the weak regime, which is sensitive to structures on scales $\sim$300 m at our observing frequency of 154 MHz, where the phase variance on this scale was 0.06 rad$^{2}$ in the most extreme case observed. Analysing over 1000 individual 2-minute observations, we compared the ionospheric phase variance with that inferred with previous measurements of refractive shifts, which are most sensitive to scales almost an order of magnitude larger. The two measurements were found to be highly correlated (Pearson correlation coefficient 0.71). We observed that for an active ionosphere, the relationship between these two metrics is in line with what would be expected if the ionosphere's structure is described by Kolmogorov turbulence between the relevant scales of 300m and 2000m. In the most extreme ionospheric conditions, the refractive shifts were sometimes found to underestimate the small-scale variance by a factor of four or more, and it is these ionospheric conditions that could have significant effects on radio astronomy observations.