Abstract
Abstract. Complex networks have emerged as an essential approach of geoscience to generate novel insights into the nature of geophysical systems. To investigate the dynamic processes in the ionosphere, a directed complex network is constructed, based on a probabilistic graph of the vertical total electron content (VTEC) from 2012. The results of the power-law hypothesis test show that both the out-degree and in-degree distribution of the ionospheric network are not scale-free. Thus, the distribution of the interactions in the ionosphere is homogenous. None of the geospatial positions play an eminently important role in the propagation of the dynamic ionospheric processes. The spatial analysis of the ionospheric network shows that the interconnections principally exist between adjacent geographical locations, indicating that the propagation of the dynamic processes primarily depends on the geospatial distance in the ionosphere. Moreover, the joint distribution of the edge distances with respect to longitude and latitude directions shows that the dynamic processes travel further along the longitude than along the latitude in the ionosphere. The analysis of “small-world-ness” indicates that the ionospheric network possesses the small-world property, which can make the ionosphere stable and efficient in the propagation of dynamic processes.
Highlights
Including large numbers of irregularities with different sizes and affected by various factors, the ionosphere performs as a complex system in terms of the spatial and temporal variation
The motivation of the current study is to explore the causal interactions between the vertical total electron content (VTEC) over different positions or cells of a global ionosphere map (GIM) within the global ionosphere based on the directed complex network
Lyze the dynamic processes in the global ionosphere based on the VTEC from Centre for Orbit Determination in Europe (CODE)
Summary
Including large numbers of irregularities with different sizes and affected by various factors (like solar irradiation, geomagnetic field, gravity wave and tidal wave; Kelly, 2009), the ionosphere performs as a complex system in terms of the spatial and temporal variation. Suteanu (2014) proposed a network-based method for the assessment of earthquakes’ relationships in space–time– magnitude patterns and further applied the results for the study of temporal variations in volcanic seismicity patterns Those two networks were built based on correlation, which was a linear measurement of the interactions in the objective system. Another geophysical application of complex networks is in climate science (Nocke et al, 2015). Peron et al (2014) built a temperature network by correlation and regarded the global grid points as nodes They showed that the network characteristics of the North American region marked the differences between the eastern and western regions.
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