Spread F, GPS phase fluctuations, and medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances over Wuhan during solar maximum

Abstract

This study employs a digisonde and a GPS receiver at Wuhan (30.5°N, 114.4°E), China to observe spread F, GPS phase fluctuations, and medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs) at nighttime in 2000. The MSTIDs are derived from the perturbations of total electron content (TEC). In this study, we explored the seasonal and nighttime occurrence rates as well as the one-to-one correspondences for these phenomena. The results show that, for the seasonal variations, three phenomena all are highly active in summer, which confirms that irregularities over Wuhan mainly relate to MSTIDs. Moreover, all spread F types have a minor occurrence peak in winter but none for the MSTIDs and the GPS phase fluctuations. Besides, none of large GPS phase fluctuations event had occurred during observation periods, which indicates that the strength of irregularities related to MSTIDs are weaker than that of equatorial plasma bubbles. For the nighttime variations, the frequency spread F occurs earlier than other spread F types which implies that disturbances start at the altitude near the F-region peak. For the one-to-one correspondences, the occurrence rates of each spread F type and GPS phase fluctuations are low during MSTIDs occurred. This implies that smaller scale irregularities which are observed as spread F or GPS phase fluctuations may only appear in some phase of MSTIDs.