A ROTI-Aided Equatorial Plasma Bubbles Detection Method

Long Tang,Mingli Chen,Osei-Poku Louis,Wu Chen

doi:10.3390/rs13214356

Abstract

In this study, we present a Rate of Total Electron Content Index (ROTI)-aided equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs) detection method based on a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) ionospheric Total Electron Content (TEC). This technique seeks the EPBs occurrence time according to the ROTI values and then extracts the detrended ionospheric TEC series, which include EPBs signals using a low-order, partial polynomial fitting strategy. The EPBs over the Hong Kong area during the year of 2014 were detected using this technique. The results show that the temporal distribution and occurrence of EPBs over the Hong Kong area are consistent with that of previous reports, and most of the TEC depletion error is smaller than 1.5 TECU (average is 0.63 TECU), suggesting that the detection method is feasible and highly accurate. Furthermore, this technique can extract the TEC depletion series more effectively, especially for those with a long duration, compared to previous method.

Highlights

Equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs) are very frequent ionospheric events associated with the depletion in plasma density, which are widely believed to be generated by the Rayleigh–Taylor (R-T) instability in the F-layer [1,2]
EPBs detection detection method method in in this this study study using using station station
We present a Rate of Total Electron Content Index (ROTI)-aided method to detect the EPBs based on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)

Summary

Introduction

Equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs) are very frequent ionospheric events associated with the depletion in plasma density, which are widely believed to be generated by the Rayleigh–Taylor (R-T) instability in the F-layer [1,2]. The study on climatology and the forecasting of EPBs has remained an open question among the scientific community during the last two decades [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16] Many measurements, such as in situ satellite data [4,5], ionosonde [6], and airglow imaging [9,16] are applied to investigate the EPBs characteristics. One common method is using a polynomial fitting with a specific window length to fit the TEC series; the detrended TEC series that might include EPBs signals are obtained by subtracting the fitted TEC series from the observed TEC series [11,12,13,14,15]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion