Study of Ionospheric Variability During Super Substorms

This paper study variability of three ionospheric parameters foF2, h′F and hmF2 to investigate the middle latitude ionospheric effect at Boulder, Colorado, USA (40°N, l105.0° W) during super substorms (SSSs) of 24 August 2005, and 7 September 2017 and 8 September 2017 respectively. Continuous wavelet transform (cwt) implemented to identify the low and high frequency and longer and shorter duration present in the signal. The result shows decrease in foF2 during SSSs of 24 August 2005 and 8 September 2017 and increase in foF2 during 7 September 2017. The highest fluctuation in h′F is noticed during SSS of 24 August 2005. The cwt shows that the coupling between solar wind and magnetosphere occurs between ~ 16 to 32 minutes for SSS of 24 August 2005 and between 27.9 to 64 minutes during super substorm of 7 and 8 September 2017 for all the ionospheric parameters respectively. This study leads to understand the impact of SSSs on communication signals due to energy injected in ionosphere during the coupling mechanism between magnetosphere-ionosphere.

Plasma re-distribution in the African low-latitude ionosphere during intense geomagnetic storms

Intense geomagnetic storms offer opportunity to understand ionospheric response to space weather events. Using Total Electron Content (TEC) data from stations along the east African sector, the two most intense storms during the 24th solar cycle, with similarly occurrence season and time were studied. We observe that ionospheric effect during the main phase is not a function of the severity of the storm, whereas the more intense storm shows greater influence on the African ionosphere during the recovery phase. Plasma movement within the equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA) was evident particularly during the recovery phase, especially during the 2015 event. For both storms, the nighttime/early morning ionospheric effect is more pronounced than the daytime effects across all stations.

The upper atmospheric responses to tidal and planetary waves

<p>Tidal and planetary waves (PWs) in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere region could have significant impact on the upper thermosphere/ionosphere system through direct propagations, E region wind dynamo, and the change of residual circulations. We would like to show some results from BeiDou and COSMIC observations, as well as TIME-GCM simulations, to illustrate the lower/upper atmospheric couplings through different mechanisms. Generally, the spatial structures of the ionospheric responses to planetary waves agree with the ionospheric fountain effect, which indicates the important roles of equatorial wind dynamos in transmitting planetary wave signals to the ionosphere. The TIME-GCM simulations show that the zonal and meridional components of the planetary waves could result in evident vertical ion drift perturbations, while the net ionospheric effect is related to both their latitudinal structures and phases. The simulations also show that the change of tidal amplitudes and secondary PWs generated by PW-tide interaction are also important to the ionospheric variabilities. Besides, the couplings through PW-induced residual circulations are exhibited by both model simulations and TEC observations from BeiDou satellite system.</p>

Performance Evaluation of Azimuth Offset Method for Mitigating the Ionospheric Effect on SAR Interferometry

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals interact with the ionosphere layer when they propagate through the atmosphere, leading to the phase delay error for SAR interferometry (InSAR). To mitigate this error for SAR interferometry, azimuth offset method is proposed. However, the performance of it has not been fully investigated. In this situation, this study makes a comprehensive performance analysis of azimuth offset method through processing the simulated and real SAR data. The experimental result indicates that this method can effectively mitigate the ionospheric phase delay error, where the standard deviation of phase difference after correction (2.6 rad.) decreased by almost 2 times, compared to those before correction (5.3 rad.) for the real SAR data. However, it is also found that the method is affected by the random noise, which may induce the improper estimation of integral constants and consequently affect the ionospheric correction. Moreover, the severe deformation signals in the interferogram may lead to the estimation error of integral constants and scaling factor. Therefore, it should mask out the deformation signals when using the azimuth offsets method to correct the ionospheric error. This study may provide useful information when using azimuth offset method to mitigate the ionospheric phase delay error on InSAR.

Ionospheric influence on the seismo-telluric current related to electromagnetic signals observed before the Wenchuan <i>M</i>_<i>S</i> 8.0 earthquake

A three-layer (Earth–air–ionosphere) physical model, as well as a two-layer (Earth–air) model, is employed in this paper to investigate the ionospheric effect on the wave fields for a finite length dipole current source co-located at a hypocenter depth and along the main fault of an earthquake when the distance between the epicenter and an observing station is up to 1000 km or even more. The results show that all electrical fields are free of ionospheric effects for different frequencies in a relative short range, e.g., ∼ 300 km for f = 1 Hz, implying the ionospheric influence on electromagnetic fields can be neglected within this range, which becomes smaller as the frequency increases. However, the ionosphere can give a constructive interference to the waves passing through and make them decay slowly when an observation is out of this range; moreover, the ionospheric effect can be up to 1–2 orders of magnitude of the electrical fields. For a ground-based observable 1.3 mV m−1 electric signal at f = 1 Hz 1440 km away from the Wenchuan MS 8.0 earthquake, the expected seismo-telluric current magnitude for the Earth–air–ionosphere model is of 5.0 × 107A, 1 magnitude smaller than the current value of 3.7 × 108A obtained by the Earth–air model free of ionospheric effects. This indicates that the ionosphere facilitates the electromagnetic wave propagation, as if the detectability of the system were improved effectively and it is easier to record a signal even for stations located at distances beyond their detectability thresholds. Furthermore, the radiating patterns of the electrical field components |Ex| and |Ey| are complementary to each other, although any two-dimensional (2-D) power distribution of these components shows strong power areas as well as weak ones, which is advantageous to register a signal if the observing system is designed to measure both of them instead of only one.