Study of equatorial plasma bubbles using all sky imager and scintillation technique from Kolhapur station: a case study

Abstract

The nightglow observations of OI 630.0 nm emission carried out from low latitude station Kolhapur using All Sky Imager (ASI) with $140^{\circ}$ field of view (FOV) for the month of April 2011 are used. The images were processed to study the field aligned irregularities often called as equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs). The present study focuses on the occurrence of scintillation during the traversal of EPBs over ionospheric pierce point (IPP). Here we dealt with the depletion level (depth) of the EPB structures and its effect on VHF signals. We compared VHF scintillation data with airglow intensities at Ionospheric pierce point (IPP) from the same location and found that the largely depleted EPBs make stronger scintillation. From previous literature, it is believed that the small scale structures are present near the steeper walls of EPBs which often degrades the communication, the analysis presented in this paper confirms this belief.