In this paper we show that the large thunderstorm called the "Great White Spot", which raged for about 9 months in Saturn's troposphere in 2010/2011, was accompanied by changes in the periodicity and phasing of auroral radio emissions. We suggest that the thunderstorm was a source of intense gravity waves causing a global change in Saturn’s ionospheric winds via energy and momentum deposition. This supports the theory that Saturn’s magnetospheric periodicities are driven by the upper atmosphere.

The equation for conservation of wave action is explicitly derived for magnetohydrodynamic waves in a plasma that varies slowly in space and time. Together with generalized ray-tracing equations, it is equivalent to a WKBJ solution of the problem and allows the computation of energy exchange between wave and background plasma as well as the variation of the amplitudes of the field components along the ray. The method is illustrated by application to simple examples.

The determination of ionospheric key quantities such as the maximum electron density of the F2 layer, the corresponding F2 peak height and the F2 scale height are of high relevance in 4-D ionosphere modeling to provide information on the vertical structure of the electron density distribution. This paper discusses mathematical correlations between these parameters as derived from FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC radio occultations and regionally parameterized by means of polynomial B-splines.