A large‐amplitude traveling ionospheric disturbance produced by the May 18, 1980, explosion of Mount St. Helens

Abstract

A remarkable long‐lived, large‐scale traveling ionospheric disturbance (TID), excited by the May 18, 1980, explosion of Mount St. Helens, has been detected in total electron content monitor data. Oscillatory perturbations in the electron column density of the ionosphere with amplitudes about 10% of the nominal daytime content were detected at three stations whose ionospheric penetration points lie between 1610 and 1890 km from Mount St. Helens. Smaller perturbations were detected at five of six additional stations between 3760 and 4950 km away. The period of the TID increased linearly with great‐circle distance from Mount St. Helens, ranging from ≈37 min at the nearest station to ≈116 min at the most distant one. The TID persisted for at least four cycles at the three close stations and three cycles at the more distant stations and was qualitatively similar to TIDs produced by the low‐altitude thermonuclear detonations of the 1960's. The disturbance front of this TID accelerated from an average velocity of ≈350 m/s between Mt. St. Helens and the close stations to an average velocity of ≈550 m/s to the more distant ones. In analogy with the bomb‐excited disturbances, this TID is interpreted as the ionospheric fluctuations induced by a gravity wave, excited by the explosion of Mount St. Helens, propagating in the neutral atmosphere. A model based on the free wave response of an isothermal atmosphere to a point disturbance provides a good fit to the data at the three closest stations, but no such model can account for all of the data. Modeling of the long‐distance behavior of the Mount St. Helens TID in terms of upper‐atmosphere guided gravity waves is complicated by the requirement of exciting them by a ground‐level explosion. A comprehensive explanation would probably include the propagation of energy to ionospheric heights in free modes and the excitation thereby of guided modes. There was no evidence for a strong supersonic shock wave in the ionosphere. As a result, the Mount St. Helens disturbance may prove to be a cleaner test of detailed theories of the point excitation and propagation of gravity waves in a realistic atmosphere than were TIDs excited by thermonuclear weapons.