Real-time Scintillation Monitoring with Low-Cost GNSS-Based Monitors

Recent advances in affordable Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) hardware have opened new opportunities in space weather research. For instance, Rodrigues and Moraes (2019) and Gomez Socola and Rodrigues (2022) developed a series of inexpensive ionospheric scintillation and Total Electron Content (TEC) monitors referred to as ScintPi. The most advanced version (3.0) version of ScintPi is built using single-board computers (Raspberry Pi) and Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) GNSS receivers (ublox ZED-F9P). While not intended to fully replace commercial scintillation monitors, ScintPi have proven to be effective across various application including Equatorial Plasma Bubble (EPB) studies (Sousasantos et al., 2023) and ionospheric irregularity drift measurements (Gomez Socola et al., 2025).
In this student-led project, we expanded ScintPi capabilities by developing a real-time scintillation monitoring system with an interactive online dashboard. We tested this service on measurements from a ScintPi deployed at the University of Texas at Dallas (32.99°N, 96.76°W). Scintillation is quantified by the S4 index, calculated as the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean of 20 Hz signal intensity measurements. We implement S4 computation on the Raspberry Pi using parallel computing via the POSIX threads (pthreads) library in C. These S4 measurements are stored locally on the Raspberry Pi in comma separated value (CSV) files, then automatically synchronized to a remote server via rsync over a ZeroTier VPN. We developed a web dashboard for visualization using Dash (a Python framework based on Flask). This interactive dashboard displays the last 24 hours of scintillation activity and updates with new data every five minutes. Users can zoom into specific time windows, inspect details of each data point, and view an overhead sky plot of the data. These features help users quickly identify scintillation events and distinguish them from environmental effects like multipath, aiding in optimal receiver installation. Additionally, onboard scintillation processing reduces data volume from roughly 1 GB of raw data per day to just a few megabytes of S4 indices. This approach makes continuous monitoring feasible even in areas with limited internet bandwidth. Overall, our low-cost, real-time monitoring prototype greatly enhances the accessibility of space weather research, making ionospheric scintillation events easier to observe and quicker to detect.
References:
Gomez Socola, J., & Rodrigues, F. S. (2022). ScintPi 2.0 and 3.0: Low-cost GNSS-based monitors of ionospheric scintillation and TEC. Earth, Planets and Space, 74(1), 185.
Gomez Socola, J., et al. (2025). ScintPi measurements of low-latitude ionospheric irregularity drifts using spaced-receiver technique and SBAS signals. Atmos. Meas. Tech., 18, 909–919.
Rodrigues, F. S., & Moraes, A. O. (2019). ScintPi: A Low-Cost, Easy-to-Build GPS Ionospheric Scintillation Monitor for DASI Studies of Space Weather, Education, and Citizen Science Initiatives. Earth and Space Science, 6, 1547–1560. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EA000588
Sousasantos, J., et al. (2023). Severe L-band scintillation from an extreme equatorial plasma bubble: joint ground-based and GOLD observations. Earth, Planets and Space, 75, 41.