An observing system simulation experiment for FORMOSAT-5/AIP probing topside ionospheric plasma irregularities by using DEMETER/IAP

Abstract

The ion density probed by IAP (Instrument d'Analyse du Plasma) on board the DEMETER (Detection of Electro-Magnetic Emissions Transmitted from Earthquake Regions) satellite is used to find whether the science payload of Advanced Ionospheric Probe (AIP) on board FORMOSAT-5 can be employed to observe space weather of ionospheric plasma irregularities. The low-latitude irregularities within ±15° dip latitudes of the DEMETER/IAP ion density are nighttime phenomena, and become prominent in the South America-Central Africa sector almost all year round, especially during May to August. The high-latitude irregularities of the DEMETER/ IAP ion density appear around ±65° dip latitude worldwide in both daytime and nighttime, and become very intense in the winter and the equinox month/hemisphere. DEMETER/IAP results show that FORMOSAT-5/AIP can be used to monitor space weather of ionospheric daytime/nighttime plasma irregularities in not only the lowbut also high-latitude ionosphere.

Occurrence of Nighttime Irregularities and Their Scale Evolution in the Ionosphere Due To the Solar Eclipse Over East Asia on 21 June 2020

“…On the other hand, the instantaneous total amplitude ( A ) of irregularities or structures is defined as the integral of the Hilbert spectrum within a specific frequency interval $$A(t)=\int \nolimits_{\omega 1}^{\omega 2}H(\omega ,t)d\omega $$ (Sun, Liu, et al., 2015). The HHT analysis is capable of carefully exposing the development of the ionospheric irregularities and structures on various scales (Chen et al., 2001; Liu et al., 2017; Su et al., 2005, 2021; Sun, Shen, et al., 2021; Sun et al., 2022). Furthermore, we also took the median of the TEC values in each grid of 1° latitude by 1° longitude at each 10‐min time interval to estimate the net changes in the ionospheric background density.…”

Critical Issues in Ionospheric Data Quality and Implications for Scientific Studies

“…Models of ionospheric response to geomagnetic storms rely directly on the quality of available data; problems in the data carry straight into these models including biases and larger uncertainty due to erroneous, repeated, and missing observations. To be more specific, the scientific community has used the World Data Center ionospheric database to support innovative research, including studies of both short-and long-term processes (e.g., Araujo-Pradere et al, 2004;Araujo-Pradere et al, 2005;Jarvis et al, 2002;Marin et al, 2001), as well as case studies of individual disturbances, that is, plasma bubble descriptions (Shiokawa et al, 2015), and traveling ionospheric disturbances (Lin et al, 2017), ionospheric response during extreme conditions (Burešová & Laštovička, 2017;Habarulema et al, 2017), and modeling of various purposes (Hernández-Pajares et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2017). Because issues with the quality of the data can substantially affect the outcome of the analyses, feedback from users that are conducting original research based on the data is one of the best ways to detect and possibly correct these issues to decrease their prevalence in the data record.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue on “Earth Observation FORMOSAT-5”

“…Figure 1 also depicts the AIP sensor cube, consisting of a floating potential plate, a planar Langmuir probe electrode, a series of four electroformed gold grids, and a quadrant collector with four gold-coating segments. Based on the well-proven scientific contributions made by the FORMOSAT-1/IPEI and other similar data, three papers in the special issue conclude that FORMOSAT-5/ AIP's high-resolution ionospheric data will also significantly contribute to scientific applications, especially on the ionospheric plasma irregularities study (Liu et al 2017b), seismo-ionospheric precursors (Liu and Chao 2017) detection, and ionospheric space weather forecast . During the first made in Taiwan FORMOSAT-5 satellite development process (Chang et al 2012b), NSPO has also acquired several in-house space technologies including the CMOS-type Remote Sensing Instrument (RSI) payload (Liu et al 2017a) and key spacecraft components.…”