Event Details

Space and Planetary Physics seminar

Abstract: The South African National Space Agency (SANSA) is poised to provide space weather applications and products to the aviation sector through its Space Weather Regional Warning Centre for Africa. In order to provide accurate and reliable products it is imperative that we have a good understanding of our local and regional ionospheric environment, in particular the dynamics of this ionised layer. One of the important contributors to the variability of the ionosphere is ionospheric disturbances, particularly traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs). TIDs are wave-like perturbations that commonly occur in the ionospheric F-region due to either atmospheric gravity waves or electromagnetic instabilities. This presentation will look at the research activities on TIDs at SANSA, with a focus on statistically quantifying the characteristics of nighttime medium-scale TIDs (MSTIDs). This climatology was obtained using night-time 630.0 nm airglow intensity measurements between September 2018 and August 2019 from an all-sky imager located at Sutherland, South Africa (32.4˚ S, 20.8˚ E; magnetic latitude 40.7˚ S). In addition, we will explore the possible influence of ionospheric instabilities, such as sporadic E, on the generation of these MSTIDs as well as the influence of the background wind on their propagation. The latter was obtained by utilizing thermospheric neutral wind data from a co-located Fabry Perot interferometer (FPI) while the former was obtained from ionograms produced by South African ionosonde network.

If someone from outside of the SPP group would like to join the webinar, please send a request to n.rogers1@lancaster.ac.uk