SpICE: A program to study small‐scale disturbances in the ionosphere

Abstract

Ionospheric disturbances observed by bottom‐side soundings of the ionosphere appear at many temporal and spatial scales. Australia has many simultaneous observations from vertically orientated ionospheric sounders with spatial separations on the scale of 1000 km. However, with this spatial sampling only large scale ionospheric disturbances can be mapped and subsequently modeled. DSTO has an experimental program in progress to investigate the smaller spatial scale disturbances. These are often seen on vertical incidence soundings and are uncorrelated with soundings from greater than 500 km away. They can also be uncorrelated with soundings from the same site only 15 min later. The DSTO program to investigate these ionospheric disturbances is called SpICE, for Spatial Ionospheric Correlation Experiment. SpICE uses a small set of transmitters and receivers with varying separations to achieve a geographically spread set of near‐vertical incidence ionospheric “reflection” points separated by 50–150 km, allowing us to probe disturbances at this spatial scale. Using the latest digital receiver technology we can collect amplitude and phase information from the ionospheric returns of the continuous wave transmissions of a nearby transmitter that is rapidly sweeping through the HF band. The returned signal is processed at a very high resolution to achieve good signal‐to‐noise complex ionograms at better than one‐minute time updates. To date there have been three SpICE campaigns. This paper will discuss the SpICE program goals and highlight some of the unusual features observed in the first campaign. Following papers will look more closely at this data set and the subsequent campaigns.