Abstract
AbstractThis study presents initial results of the ionospheric scintillation in the F layer using the S4 index derived from the radio occultation experiment (RO‐S4) on FORMOSAT‐7/COSMIC‐2 (F7/C2). With the sufficiently dense RO‐S4 observations at low latitudes, it is possible to construct hourly, global scintillation maps to monitor equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs). The preliminary F7/C2 RO‐S4 during August 2019 to April 2020 show clear scintillation distributions around American and the Atlantic Ocean longitudes. The RO‐S4 near Jicamarca are compared with range‐time‐intensity (RTI) maps of the 50 MHz radar, and the results show that the occurrence of intense RO‐S4 in the range 0.125–0.5 are co‐located with the bottomside of the spread‐F patterns. Increases in RO‐S4 at the upward phase of bottom‐side oscillations is theoretically consistent with large‐scale wave seeding of the EPBs. The locations and occurrences of the RO‐S4 greater than 0.5 are consistent with airglows depletions from the NASA GOLD mission. Climatology analyses show that monthly occurrences of RO‐S4 > 0.5 agree well with the monthly EPB occurrences in GOLD 135.6 nm image, and show a similar longitudinal distribution to that of DMSP and C/NOFS in‐situ measurements. The results suggest that the RO‐S4 intensities can be utilized to identify EPBs of specific scales.
Published Version
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