Open AccessArticle10.1029/2011ja016760

Magnetospherically reflected, specularly reflected, and backscattered whistler mode radio-sounder echoes observed on the IMAGE satellite: 2. Sounding of electron density, ion effective mass (meff), ion composition (H+, He+, O+), and density irregularities

14PDF

TL;DRAbstract

[1] A companion paper by Sonwalkar et al. (2011) provided new details of whistler mode radio sounding of the altitude range below ∼5000 km by the Radio Plasma Imager (RPI) instrument on the IMAGE satellite. That paper presented frequency-vs- group time delay records of echoes whose raypaths either 1) reversed direction through refraction at altitudes above the ionosphere where the wave frequency was approximately equal to the local lower hybrid resonance frequency flh (magnetospherically reflected or MR echoes), or 2) returned to IMAGE from reflection points along the sharp lower boundary of the ionosphere at ∼90 km (obliquely incident (OI) or normally incident (NI) specularly reflected (SR) echoes). The MR and OI echo paths were shown to form narrow loops, while the NI echo followed the same raypath down and back. Furthermore, the echoes were found to be discrete or broadened in time delay either by multipath propagation or by scattering from field aligned irregularities (FAIs). We be

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper

[1] A companion paper by Sonwalkar et al. (2011) provided new details of whistler mode radio sounding of the altitude range below ∼5000 km by the Radio Plasma Imager (RPI) instrument on the IMAGE satellite. That paper presented frequency-vs- group time delay records of echoes whose raypaths either 1) reversed direction through refraction at altitudes above the ionosphere where the wave frequency was approximately equal to the local lower hybrid resonance frequency flh (magnetospherically reflected or MR echoes), or 2) returned to IMAGE from reflection points along the sharp lower boundary of the ionosphere at ∼90 km (obliquely incident (OI) or normally incident (NI) specularly reflected (SR) echoes). The MR and OI echo paths were shown to form narrow loops, while the NI echo followed the same raypath down and back. Furthermore, the echoes were found to be discrete or broadened in time delay either by multipath propagation or by scattering from field aligned irregularities (FAIs). We be

Chat

Click to start Chat