A method for determining a scintillation index in the presence of anisotropic irregularities in the perturbed ionosphere

A method for determining a scintillation index in the presence of anisotropic irregularities in the perturbed ionosphere has been developed. The method is based on reduction of quadratic form of arguments found in autocorrelation functions of electron density and phase fluctuations to scalar value and on relying on this information whilst performing Radon and Fourier transforms. Expressions used for scintillation index calculation, which help evaluating the impact of scintillations with high spectral index value including the whole range of possible values of first Fresnel zone radius to outer-scale dimension of the irregularities ratio have been derived using this method. The expressions obtained are defined for both Gaussian and power-like spectral density fluctuations with spectral index value ranging from 4 to 6 and are presented in a form convenient for calculations.