Equatorial scintillation characteristics during solar minimum: Observations from the SCINDA network

The Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite was launched in April 2008 for the purpose of specifying and forecasting equatorial ionospheric scintillation. For the first two years on orbit the satellite operated in a period of very low solar flux and observed a significant occurrence of irregularities in the post-midnight timeframe while detecting an unexpectedly low level of disturbances in the post-sunset sector prior to midnight. Here we investigate the occurrence of irregularities as observed from the SCINDA network of ground sensors, comparing and contrasting differences and similarities.