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Ionospheric Induced Scintillation: A Space Weather Enigma, Jan Josef Sojka

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The effect of scintillation on radio signals whose propagation path involves the Earth’s ionosphere is analogous to the allies of World War II receiving radio messages that had passed through the Enigma machine. In both these cases, man-made information has been encrypted and transmitted via radio. The two encryption methods are shown in Figure 1. The right panel shows a World War II Enigma machine used extensively by German U-boats to convey encrypted messages transmitted by radio [Perera, 2010]. The left panel gives an extreme example of a mapping of ionospheric irregularities at 3 m, which creates very severe scintillation …