Massimo Materassi

Long-term trends of the critical frequency of the F2 layer at northern and southern high latitude regions

Abstract The long-term behaviour of the plasma frequency of the F2 layer, foF2, is investigated to contribute to the discussion about the natural or anthropogenic origin of the ionospheric long-term changes. In this paper, long time series of hourly foF2 data from two high latitude ionospheric observatories of both the hemispheres are analysed. A decreasing trend of foF2 is found confirming a previous result obtained by using the foF2 monthly medians from Antarctic stations. This negative trend does not show a clear dependence on the long-term behaviour of the geomagnetic activity impact on the ionosphere.

Low latitude scintillations: A comparison of modeling and observations within the CIGALA project

Ionospheric scintillations can seriously jeopardize the reliability of the GNSS signals and consequently can cause significant error or outage on precise positioning applications. The threat is most acute at low latitudes where ionospheric irregularities are more likely to occur resulting in L-band signal scintillations. This paper describes the effort made to model the ionospheric scintillations over the Latin American region in the frame of the CIGALA project funded by the European GNSS Supervisory Authority within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. Comparisons between the low-latitude model of scintillations and observations are here presented and discussed within the project perspectives.