Spectral fluctuation analysis of ionospheric inhomogeneities over Brazilian territory Part II: E-F valley region plasma instabilities

Abstract

The turbulent-like process associated with ionospheric instabilities, has been identified as the main nonlinear process that drives the irregularities observed in the different ionospheric regions. In this complementary study, as proposed in the first article of this two-paper series (Fornari et al., 2016), we performed the detrended fluctuation analysis of the equatorial E-F valley region electron density fluctuations measured from an in situ experiment performed over the Brazilian territory. The spectral consistency with the K41 turbulent universality class is analyzed for E-F valley region from the DFA spectra for four electron density time series. A complementary detrended fluctuation analysis for four time series of the F-layer electric field is also presented. Consistent with the results obtained for the F region, the analysis for the E-F valley region also shows a very high spectral variation (≫50%). Thus, the spectral analysis performed in both parts of the series suggest that a process such as the homogeneous turbulence K41 (β=-5/3±2%) is inappropriate to describe both the fluctuations of electron density and the electric field associated with the main ionospheric instabilities.