Prediction of scintillation cumulative statistics using classical and high resolution radiosoundings

Scintillation has an important impact on the earth-space propagation and affects the fade mitigation techniques developed for frequencies above 20 GHz. Scintillation being a random variation superimposed on the signal, it is described by its variance. Most of the exiting models predict the cumulative distribution function (cdf) of scintillation from ground measured parameters, such as temperature and humidity. The use of radiosoundings increases the accuracy of the prediction. Some problems have however to be solved, such as the sensitivity of the cdf to the value of some derivatives used in the calculation. High resolution radiosoundings give better height accuracy but increase the noise present in the calculation. Preliminary solutions are proposed to improve the processing of the radiosonde data and the results are compared with measured data.