Abstract
The nighttime main F region trough extends into the sunlit afternoon sector. This trough feature exhibits both a strong magnetic activity dependence and a longitude (UT) dependence. Whalen (1987), using International Geophysical Year (IGY) ionosonde data, showed that both of these effects are readily extracted from foF2 observations. In this study we show that the longitude effect is the same as that contained in the Utah State University time‐dependent ionospheric model. It arises from the offset of the geomagnetic axis from the geographic axis. The magnetic activity dependency is associated with the westward convection in the afternoon sector. It is also contained in the ionospheric model via the empirical magnetospheric convection model. This one‐to‐one observational‐model agreement is unique; to date no other magnetic activity dependent ionospheric feature has been simulated this systematically.
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