How ionospheric scintillation disturbs GPS communication Tropospheric lightning causes disturbances in the high atmosphere, particularly in the ionosphere. The ionosphere stretches from 60 to 1000 kilometers above the Earth. Lightning, thunderstorms, and other atmospheric phenomena are common in the troposphere layer of our planet. However, similar tropospheric phenomena are increasingly being found to disrupt GPS signals.      What is scintillation When a molecule or ion enters a medium (which may or may not contain ionized particles), it disturbs the entire medium. It causes chemical reactions with the medium's molecules and ions in plain language. As a result, the electrons in outer orbits leave and move to the upper trajectories of molecules or ions. They try to get to stable states / prior states later. The electrons return to their original orbit, emitting light. This is how scintillation happens. What is ionospheric scintillation Ionosphere disturbances...

Overview Sky Wave, Microwave Link Communication, and Satellite Communication  (SATCOM) are the focus of this article. Sky Waves are essentially AM waves that the ionosphere reflects. For long-distance communication on Earth, we employ standard microwave link transmission. However, we all know that the earth is not flat, but rather oval in shape. As a result, the signal can only reach a few kilometers on a straight line of sight path (LOS). The signal is then reflected by the earth's surface. But we know that with that microwave link, we can communicate hundreds of kilometers distance. We'll look at how this happens in this article. Terrestrial satellite communication has now replaced microwave relay link communication. Figure: Ionosphere Reflection - suitable for AM band (Sky Wave) 1. Sky Wave You can see how the ionosphere bounces the radio signal and enables the ground station to communicate with the transmitter hundreds of kilometers away. This method is ideal for communica...