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Near Real‐Time Global Plasma Irregularity Monitoring by FORMOSAT‐7/COSMIC‐2
Author(s) -
Chen ShihPing,
Lin Charles C. H.,
Rajesh Panthalingal Krishanunni,
Liu JannYenq,
Eastes Richard,
Chou MinYang,
Choi JongMin
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: space physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-9402
pISSN - 2169-9380
DOI - 10.1029/2020ja028339
Subject(s) - radio occultation , scintillation , latitude , interplanetary scintillation , ionosphere , middle latitudes , radar , cosmic cancer database , geology , range (aeronautics) , environmental science , atmospheric sciences , meteorology , geodesy , climatology , physics , astrophysics , plasma , geophysics , optics , telecommunications , coronal mass ejection , quantum mechanics , detector , computer science , solar wind , materials science , composite material
This study presents initial results of the ionospheric scintillation in the F layer using the S4 index derived from the radio occultation experiment (RO‐S4) on FORMOSAT‐7/COSMIC‐2 (F7/C2). With the sufficiently dense RO‐S4 observations at low latitudes, it is possible to construct hourly, global scintillation maps to monitor equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs). The preliminary F7/C2 RO‐S4 during August 2019 to April 2020 show clear scintillation distributions around American and the Atlantic Ocean longitudes. The RO‐S4 near Jicamarca are compared with range‐time‐intensity (RTI) maps of the 50 MHz radar, and the results show that the occurrence of intense RO‐S4 in the range 0.125–0.5 are co‐located with the bottomside of the spread‐F patterns. Increases in RO‐S4 at the upward phase of bottom‐side oscillations is theoretically consistent with large‐scale wave seeding of the EPBs. The locations and occurrences of the RO‐S4 greater than 0.5 are consistent with airglows depletions from the NASA GOLD mission. Climatology analyses show that monthly occurrences of RO‐S4 > 0.5 agree well with the monthly EPB occurrences in GOLD 135.6 nm image, and show a similar longitudinal distribution to that of DMSP and C/NOFS in‐situ measurements. The results suggest that the RO‐S4 intensities can be utilized to identify EPBs of specific scales.