Automatic GNSS Ionospheric Scintillation Detection with Radio Occultation Data Using Machine Learning Algorithm

Abstract

Ionospheric scintillation often occurs in the polar and equator regions, and it can affect the signals of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Therefore, the ionospheric scintillation detection applied to the polar and equator regions is of vital importance for improving the performance of satellite navigation. GNSS radio occultation is a remote sensing technique that primarily utilizes GNSS signals to study the Earth’s atmosphere, but its measurement results are susceptible to the effects of ionospheric scintillation. In this study, we propose an ionospheric scintillation detection algorithm based on the Sparrow-Search-Algorithm-optimized Extreme Gradient Boosting model (SSA-XGBoost), which uses power spectral densities of the raw signal intensities from GNSS occultation data as input features to train the algorithm model. To assess the performance of the proposed algorithm, we compare it with other machine learning algorithms such as XGBoost and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) using historical ionospheric scintillation data. The results show that the SSA-XGBoost method performs much better compared to the SVM and XGBoost models, with an overall accuracy of 97.8% in classifying scintillation events and a miss detection rate of only 12.9% for scintillation events with an unbalanced GNSS RO dataset. This paper can provide valuable insights for designing more robust GNSS receivers.