Ionospheric scintillation over Antarctica during the storms of 2010

Physics – Plasma Physics

Scientific paper

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[2439] Ionosphere / Ionospheric Irregularities, [6934] Radio Science / Ionospheric Propagation, [7859] Space Plasma Physics / Transport Processes, [7949] Space Weather / Ionospheric Storms

Scientific paper

At the present time our knowledge of the Earth's ionosphere is dominated by measurements from the Northern Hemisphere. In spite of recent evidence indicating unexplained differences in the ionospheres from the two hemispheres, there is still very little information from the ionosphere over the Southern oceans and the Antarctic. Although the Antarctic is rather sparsely instrumented for ionospheric study, over the past decade increasing numbers of geodetic GPS receivers have been deployed there and more recently several groups have installed specialist GPS equipment for monitoring scintillation. In January 2010 a project commenced that involved the remote deployment of equipment at 81 degrees and 89 degrees South geographic. The objective of the fieldwork was to deploy GPS receiving equipment that would for the first time take simultaneous measurements of total electron content (TEC), plasma velocity and ionospheric scintillation at remote locations across the Antarctic. The paper reports on the results from the first year of data collection throughout three ionospheric storms. The first storm shows a multitude of small-scale ionospheric irregularities over the auroral and polar regions while the high-latitude ionosphere is in partial darkness. TEC is observed entering the polar cap and being broken up into a patch in a region of strong phase scintillation. The second and third storms occur in the deep Antarctic winter and show far less in the way of TEC in the polar cap; nevertheless they show strong evidence of phase scintillation and irregularities observed from multiple instruments across the polar region. The results provide new evidence for the importance of particle precipitation in causing phase scintillation in the polar regions on low-elevation GPS signals. It is anticipated that this will be useful input in forming a realistic statistical model of the irregularities in the high-latitude ionosphere that are responsible for phase and amplitude scintillation on a variety of radio signals.

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