Large Scale Optical Mapping of the Ionosphere

Download or read book Large Scale Optical Mapping of the Ionosphere written by E. J. Weber and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new instrument for all sky, spectrophotometric imaging of aurora and airglow was installed in the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory's Airborne Ionospheric Observatory. Initial observations of equatorial and near-equatorial 6300 angstroms OI airglow show the existence of north-south aligned regions of airglow depletion. These dark bands often extend more than 1200 km in the north-south direction and 50 to 200 km in the east-west direction. Simultaneous airborne ionospheric soundings indicate that these regions of airglow depletion are characterized by an increase in the virtual height of the F-layer. A simple model of field aligned electron density depletion in the bottomside of the F-layer explains both the airglow observations and the ionospheric soundings. Initial auroras zone measurements show the structure and dynamics of the subvisual auroras in the noon sector that result from dayside precipitation. UHF satellite-to-aircraft propagation through the f-region auroras result in amplitude scintillations, both in the noon and midnight local time sectors. (Author).