Forcing of the upper Atmosphere from Coupling of Troposphere during extreme weather systems (FACTs)
Channel: Michael Nolan
Date: 2023-02-16

ASAP Lunch talk - Pedrina Terra - Forcing of the upper Atmosphere from Coupling of Troposphere during extreme weather systems

Understanding the Earth’s atmosphere and its ionized portion, the ionosphere, as an integrated, coupled system remains a great challenge. This system is strongly influenced by various space weather drivers such as solar flares, and this control (from above) is comparatively well explored. In contrast, the continuous influence of meteorological drivers (forcing from below) remains largely unexplored.

In this talk, I will present the project FACTs “Forcing of the upper Atmosphere from Coupling of Troposphere during extreme weather systems”, which aims to address open questions in aeronomy related to the vertical coupling of the Earth’s ionosphere-thermosphere (IT) system. FACTs will explore the energetic waves generated by Extreme Weather Systems (EWS) – such as tropical storms and hurricanes, which yield atmospheric oscillations, to enhance our knowledge of how tropospheric forcing impacts the ionosphere. FACTs proposes to employ a wide range of instrumental tools at the Arecibo Observatory (AO) and its Remote Optical Facility (ROF) in the island of Culebra to monitor the middle and upper atmosphere response to the EWS traveling towards the Caribbean and the US. It will cover a broad range of altitudes between ~60 km and ~ 450 km and will include radio receivers, a meteor radar, lidars, photometers, all-sky imagers (ASIs), Fabry-Perot interferometers (FPIs), and ionosonde. FACTs is focus on (1) analysis of the response of the D-region ionosphere (60-90 km in altitude) to EWS activity; (2) investigation of EWS effects on the medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs, a manifestation of GWs in the F-region ionosphere above 150 km in altitude), and (3); comparative analysis of the neutral and electron densities during MSTIDs to distinguish between current competing theories on their origin.

FACTs is a collaborative proposal funded by NSF and involving UCF, Georgia Tech, and Penn State University.


Dr. Pedrina Terra has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. In the course of this degree, she joined the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) as an undergraduate fellow in the Space and Atmospheric group. There she heard about Arecibo Observatory (AO) for the first time and fell in love with space sciences. When she graduated, she started her master’s at INPE in Space Geophysics, under a former AO scientist’s supervision (Dr. Sobral) to study the plasma bubble features over the Brazilian territory. A couple of years later, she started her Ph. D. at INPE to study the dynamics of the ionosphere‐thermosphere system. During her Ph.D. she spent one year (2002) as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sheffield, England.

Dr. Terra started at Arecibo Observatory in 2006 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Space and Atmospheric Science group. Since 2012, Dr. Terra has been a Senior Observatory Scientist at the AO, where she is responsible for the Arecibo Optical Laboratory. Terra is currently the PI of the Remote Optical Facility (ROF) on the island of Culebra and the PRISMA (Puerto Rican Studies Using Meteor Radar) project.

Dr. Terra’s research interest includes the remote sensing of the mesosphere and thermosphere of the Earth, airglow emissions, gravity waves, MSTIDs, irregularities, coupling of the atmospheric regions, and meteor radar-associated studies.