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Ann. Geophys., 26, 1725-1730, 2008
www.ann-geophys.net/26/1725/2008/
© European Geosciences Union 2008
VHF scintillations, orientation of the anisotropy of F-region irregularities and direction of plasma convection in the polar cap
E. D. Tereshchenko1, N. Yu. Romanova1, and A. V. Koustov2
1Polar Geophysical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 15 Khalturina, 183010 Murmansk, Russia
2Institute of Space and Atmospheric Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Abstract. Scintillation data recorded at the polar cap station
Barentsburg are shown to occasionally exhibit two or more peaks in the
latitudinal profiles of the amplitude dispersion. Comparison with concurrent
SuperDARN radar convection maps indicates that multiple peaks occur when
Barentsburg is located within the area of strong changes in the plasma flow
direction. When parameters of the ionospheric irregularities are inferred
from the scintillation data, the orientation of the irregularity anisotropy
in a plane perpendicular to the magnetic field is found to coincide well
with the E×B flow direction, individually for each peak of the scintillation
data. The differences were found to be mostly less than 20° for a data
set comprised of 104 events. The conclusion is made that analysis of
scintillation data allows one to infer the direction of plasma flow with a certain degree of detail.
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