GPS occultation sensor observations of ionospheric scintillation

We present the first globally distributed set of observations of radiowave scintillation by a GPS occultation sensor, the Ionospheric Occultation Experiment on board the PICOSat satellite. Examples of GPS C/A code signal‐to‐noise ratios at the L1 frequency are shown which contain strong fluctuations. The source of the fluctuations is evaluated through a statistical analysis of more than 10,000 occultations obtained during February/March 2002. The geographic and local time distributions of occultations having large values of the S4 scintillation index are consistent with known scintillation climatology, unambiguously identifying the fluctuations as ionospheric scintillation. GPS occultation measurements provide a means of measuring scintillation on a global basis, which can not be done using traditional ground‐based monitoring techniques.