Abstract
We report rare simultaneous observations of columniform sprites and associated gravity waves (GWs) using the Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) camera and All-sky imager at Prayagraj (25.5° N, 81.9° E, geomag. lat. ~ 16.5° N), India. On 30 May 2014, a Mesoscale Convective System generated a group of sprites over the north horizon that reached the upper mesosphere. Just before this event, GWs (period ~ 14 min) were seen in OH broadband airglow (emission peak ~ 87 km) imaging that propagated in the direction of the sprite occurrence and dissipated in the background atmosphere thereby generating turbulence. About 9–14 min after the sprite event, another set of GWs (period ~ 11 min) was observed in OH imaging that arrived from the direction of the TLEs. At this site, we also record Very Low Frequency navigational transmitter signal JJI (22.2 kHz) from Japan. The amplitude of the JJI signal showed the presence of GWs with ~ 12.2 min periodicities and ~ 18 min period. The GWs of similar features were observed in the ionospheric Total Electron Content variations recorded at a nearby GPS site. The results presented here are important to understand the physical coupling of the troposphere with the lower and upper ionosphere through GWs.
Highlights
Several remote sensing experiments have been installed at Prayagraj to observe the atmosphere–ionosphere system and brief details of experiments utilized in this study are as follows: TLE observations set‐up
The TLEs camera system, which recorded the sprite event on the night of 30 May 2014, uses two low light sensitive charge-coupled device (CCD) camera systems[42]
The first camera is of 16 mm F/1.4 wide-angle, horizontal field of view (FOV) of 26.5° and the vertical FOV: 15°
Summary
We present simultaneous observations of an MCS event, a transient luminous event (sprite) at the MLT region, and the GW associated perturbations induced in the lower and upper ionosphere (D-, E- and F-region). The field-of-view of the imager at OH height was ~ 200 km These observed wave characteristics are in close agreement with the results by Sentman et al.[3] who reported simultaneous observations of sprites and circular GWs in OH 720–920 nm imaging over an intense Nebraska thunderstorm on the night of 18 August 1999 having λH ~ 50 km,υ ~ 85 m/s and τ ~ 10 min. Maurya et al.[9] reported simultaneous observations of short-period (< 5 min) wave-like signatures in VLF and GPS TEC data representative of the lower and upper ionosphere, respectively These wave-like signatures were found to be caused by thunderstorm generated convective processes. The present observations which are the first from the Indian region show that MCS/thunderstorms in the troposphere can significantly perturb the lower and upper ionosphere via GWs
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