Contribution of solar radiation and geomagnetic activity to global structure of 27-day variation of ionosphere

Abstract

Twenty-seven-day variation caused by solar rotation is one of the main periodic effects of solar radiation influence on the ionosphere, and there have been many studies on this periodicity using peak electron density \(\mathrm{N_{m}F_{2}}\) and solar radio flux index F10.7. In this paper, the global electron content (GEC) and observation of Solar EUV Monitor (SEM) represent the whole ionosphere and solar EUV flux, respectively, to investigate the 27-day variation. The 27-day period components of indices \((\hbox {GEC}_{27}\), \(\hbox {SEM}_{27}\), \(\hbox {F10.7}_{27}\), \(\hbox {Ap}_{27})\) are obtained using Chebyshev band-pass filter. The comparison of regression results indicates that the index SEM has higher coherence than F10.7 with 27-day variation of the ionosphere. The regression coefficients of \(\hbox {SEM}_{27 }\) varied from 0.6 to 1.4 and the coefficients of \(\hbox {Ap}_{27}\) varied from \({-}\)0.6 to 0.3, which suggests that EUV radiation seasonal variations are the primary driver for the 27-day variations of the ionosphere for most periods. TEC map grid points on three meridians where IGS stations are dense are selected for regression, and the results show that the contribution of solar EUV radiation is positive at all geomagnetic latitudes and larger than geomagnetic activity in most latitudes. The contribution of geomagnetic activity is negative at high geomagnetic latitude, increasing with decreasing geomagnetic latitudes, and positive at low geomagnetic latitudes. The global structure of 27-day variation of ionosphere is presented and demonstrates that there are two zonal anomaly regions along with the geomagnetic latitudes lines and two peaks in the north of Southeast Asia and the Middle Pacific where \(\hbox {TEC}_{27}\) magnitude values are notably larger than elsewhere along zonal anomaly regions.