English

Studying Ionospheric Phase Structure Functions Using Wide-Band uGMRT (Band-4) Interferometric Data

Space Physics 2026-04-14 v4 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Abstract

Interferometric observations of the low-frequency radio sky (< 1 GHz) are largely limited by systematic effects introduced by the ionosphere. Here, we analyse a ten-hour nighttime uGMRT Band-4 observation of 3C48 to characterise ionospheric phase fluctuations across baselines up to 25 km. We compute spatial phase structure functions across three sub-bands (575-725~MHz), revealing power-law behaviour consistent with turbulence and a diffractive scale r_diff ~ 6.7 - 8.3 km useful for assessing calibration requirements. The turbulence exhibits anisotropy with smallest scales perpendicular to Earth's magnetic field - consistent with wave-like structures such as MSTIDs rather than field-aligned irregularities. These findings from a single case study demonstrate uGMRT's sensitivity for ionospheric characterisation at low-latitudes (~ 19 deg N) and inform direction-dependent calibration strategies for similar conditions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.08823,
  title  = {Studying Ionospheric Phase Structure Functions Using Wide-Band uGMRT (Band-4) Interferometric Data},
  author = {Dipanjan Banerjee and Abhik Ghosh and Sushanta K. Mondal and Parimal Ghosh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.08823},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

9 figures, 22 pages, Accepted in New Astronomy

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:57:01.762Z