Measurements of gradients in ionospheric parameters with a new nine-position experiment at Millstone Hill |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA;2. Institute of Nanotechnology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany;3. Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Southern California, 925 Bloom Walk, HED 216, Los Angeles, CA 90089, United States;1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada;2. Space Weather Laboratoy, Mail Code 674, GSFC/NASA, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States;3. Facultad de Cs. Astronomicas y Geofisicas, UNLP, y CONICET, Estacin Astronomica Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina |
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| Abstract: | A new nine-position experiment is now routinely carried out with the Millstone Hill incoherent scatter radars which allows estimation of spatial gradients in the measured ionospheric scalar parameters Ne, Te, and Ti, and in the components of the ion velocity vector vi. Use of this technique results in improved estimates of basic and derived parameters from incoherent scatter data at times of significant gradients. We detail the data analysis method and present the first results from this new experiment. The gradients in Ne and in the components of vi are used to compute the motion term in the ionospheric F region continuity equation ? · (Nv), which is then combined with ?N/?t to estimate the O+ recombination rate β at night. Meridional neutral winds Umer are computed from the field-aligned ion velocity v∥ and a calculation of the O+ diffusion velocity vd, and it is found that horizontal gradients in the ion velocity field at times significantly affect the calculation of the neutral winds. |
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