MONITORtoolbox - Software Tool for the Analysis of Ionospheric Scintillation Data from the ESA Monitor Network

The proposed paper presents the MONITORtoolbox, a set of Python-coded software tools to perform automatized large-scale processing of data from the Monitor network of the European Space Agency (ESA). The latter is a project aimed at continuously monitoring ionospheric scintillation events from multiple ground stations strategically located around the globe. It accommodates a repository with a large amount of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) measurements containing scintillation events for users to analyze scintillation data or for research purposes. The objective of this paper is to unveil the existence of the Monitor network for the research of ionospheric scintillation and to show the potential of the MONITORtoolbox for providing access to a large amount of data that otherwise, without a systematic processing, becomes practically useless. The software that we have developed implements the means to collect data and store it in a local database for quick offline access, it detects the presence of scintillation events based on certain conditions and criteria defined by the user and identifies its properties in terms of duration, time of occurrence, intensity and satellite location, and it implements the tools to compute relevant statistics, thus unveiling the insights on ionospheric scintillation phenomena. To the best of our knowledge, the MONITORtoolbox is a novel contribution of the work presented herein for the transformation of the raw data provided by Monitor into valuable wisdom on ionospheric scintillation, thus setting the grounds for the development of similar tools for different research fields that rely on a remote database with a similar structure to that of Monitor.