CEDAR science highlight: F-region ionospheric variability across both polar caps
Channel: Alex Chartier
Date: 11/06/2020

The polar cap ionosphere is, by some measures, more variable in January than in July in both the northern and southern hemispheres. We identify the reasons for this surprising pattern using GPS-based tomography and first-principles physics-based modeling. 

This is an invited submission for the Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) virtual meeting of 2020.  

This material is based on published work funded by the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Natural Environment Research Council (UK): 

Chartier, A. T., Huba, J. D., & Mitchell, C. N. (2019). On the Annual Asymmetry of High‐Latitude Sporadic F. Space Weather, 17(11), 1618-1626. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019SW002305#

Chartier, A. T., Mitchell, C. N., & Miller, E. S. (2018). Annual occurrence rates of ionospheric polar cap patches observed using Swarm. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 123(3), 2327-2335.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017JA024811