Magnetospheric disturbances, and the GPS operation

Abstract

We have investigated a dependence of the relative density of phase slips in the GPS navigation system on the disturbance level of the Earth's magnetosphere. The study is based on using Internet-available selected data from the global GPS network, with the simultaneously handled number of receiving stations ranging from 160 to 323. The analysis used four days from the period 1999-2000, with the values of the geomagnetic field disturbance index Dst from 0 to -300 nT. During strong magnetic storms, the relative density of phase slips on mid latitudes exceeds the one for magnetically quiet days by one-two orders of magnitude as a minimum, and reaches a few and (for some of the GPS satellites) even ten percent of the total density of observations. Furthermore, the level of phase slips for the GPS satellites located on the sunward side of the Earth was by a factor of 5-10 larger compared with the opposite side of the Earth. The high positive correlation of an increase in the density of phase slips and the intensity of ionospheric irregularities during geomagnetic disturbances as detected in this study points to the fact that the increase is slips is caused by the scattering of the GPS signal from ionospheric irregularities.