Ionospheric scintillation over Antarctica during the storm of 5–6 April 2010

Abstract

[1] On 5 April 2010 a coronal mass ejection produced a traveling solar wind shock front that impacted the Earth's magnetosphere, producing the largest geomagnetic storm of 2010. The storm resulted in a prolonged period of phase scintillation on Global Positioning System signals in Antarctica. The scintillation began in the deep polar cap at South Pole just over 40 min after the shock front impact was recorded by a satellite at the first Lagrangian orbit position. Scintillation activity continued there for many hours. On the second day, significant phase scintillation was observed from an auroral site (81 S) during the postmidnight sector in association with a substorm. Particle data from polar-orbiting satellites provide indication of electron and ion precipitation into the Antarctic region during the geomagnetic disturbance. Total electron content maps show enhanced electron density being drawn into the polar cap in response to southward turning of the interplanetary magnetic field. The plasma enhancement structure then separates from the dayside plasma and drifts southward. Scintillation on the first day is coincident spatially and temporally with a plasma depletion region both in the dayside noon sector and in the dayside cusp. On the second day, scintillation is observed in the nightside auroral region and appears to be strongly associated with ionospheric irregularities caused by E region particle precipitation.

Interhemispheric comparison of GPS phase scintillation at high latitudes during the magnetic-cloud-induced geomagnetic storm of 5–7 April 2010

“…The method is an adaptation of the MIDAS (Multi-Instrument Data Assimilation System) method developed by Spencer and Mitchell (2007) and the IDA4D (Ionospheric Data Assimilation Four-Dimensional) technique by Bust et al (2004). The ionospheric electron density was reconstructed on a three-dimensional grid of resolution 4 • in latitude, 4 • in longitude and 40 km in altitude (Kinrade et al, 2011). Electron density images were produced with 10-min GPS data samples using a tomographic space-time inversion.…”

“…6b). (Kinrade et al, 2011). For the Arctic TEC maps, a total of 57 sites were used to reconstruct TEC maps.…”

An autonomous adaptive low-power instrument platform (AAL-PIP) for remote high-latitude geospace data collection

“…This is accomplished through the precipitation of energetic particles along magnetic field lines into the atmosphere producing the aurora, and through an intensification of electrical current flowing in the highly conducting ionospheric auroral electrojet. GPS scintillations are often observed during geomagnetically disturbed times (Prikryl et al, 2011;Kinrade et al, 2012). Investigating interhemispheric comparisons of bipolar GPS scintillation maps, Prikryl et al (2013) have reported that the scintillation occurrence is significantly higher in the southern cusp and polar cap compared to the northern regions.…”

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“…The magnetic coupling between the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) and the magnetosphere controls the plasma structuring [Hunsucker and Hargreaves, 2003]. Observations of scintillation at auroral and polar latitudes and the influence of the IMF on the formation and dynamics of plasma patches have been reported [Mitchell et al, 2005;De Franceschi et al, 2008;Meggs et al, 2008;Prikryl et al, 2011;Kinrade et al, 2012, and was investigated by Alfonsi et al [2011]. Their study revealed that the IMF orientation influences mainly the scintillation distribution in the magnetic local time, thus highlighting the important role of the plasma inflow and outflow from and to the magnetosphere in the noon and midnight hours.…”