Electric currents from thunderstorms to the ionosphere during a solar cycle: Quasi-static modeling of the coupling mechanism

Conduction and displacement currents, and their sum the Maxwell current, generated over a thunderstorm (TS) with recurrent lightning discharges are investigated theoretically. The aim is to study better the influence of different factors on these currents, which form the link between thunderstorms and the ionosphere in the global atmospheric electrical circuit. The factors studied concern the thunderstorm characteristics (the charge separation current, and the lightning discharge parameters), as well as the atmospheric and cloud conductivity. Some of these factors may show long-term changes with the 11-year solar cycle, possibly realized through an inverse dependence of the cosmic ray flux on solar activity. Earlier investigations have suggested that the lightning-related charge redistribution and subsequent relaxation, rather than the high intensity current, is mainly the source of the energy coupled to the ionosphere. With respect to this, a quasi-electrostatic analytical model is proposed, based on Maxwell’s equations. The currents are generated by a TS modeled as a positive vertical dipole with charges which are first accumulated and then destroyed by lightning. Our computations show that the mean and peak values of the conduction and total Maxwell currents to the ionosphere depend significantly on the charge moment change. The mean currents are also sensitive to the reduction of the conductivity in thunderclouds. Small variations of the stratospheric conductivity (20% at geomagnetic latitude 40° and 40–50% at 55°) with the solar activity do not influence the currents to the ionosphere very much.     

The Physical Foundation of Forecasting Disturbances in the Geospace From Solar Disk Characteristics

The five main types of antisunward propagating energetic fluxes (particles and emission) may be thought of as well established to date, the effects of which lead to a particilar character of disturbance in the near-terrestrial environment (the Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere and atmosphere). The strongest global restructuring of the magnetosphere and ionosphere is caused by fluxes of relatively dense n of 1-70 cm-3 at the Earth's orbit) Solar Wind (SW) quasi-neutral, low-energy (E ＜ 10 keV) plasma which cause magnetospheric and ionospheric storms lasting 24 hours or longer. For that reason, main attention is given to their study at the initial stage of research. The physical essence of the method of predicting disturbances in the near-terrestrial space environment, the amplitude of which can be expressed in, for example, the Kp index units, involves:(1) identifying all the most geo-effective SW streams of type, (2) determing their sources on the solar disk,and (3) quantifying the correlations between the characteristics of their solar sources with a maximum value of the Kp-index that is caused by the concerned type of SW stream. Semi-phenomenological relations have been obtained, which relate parameters of type SW stream sources to characteristics of geomagnetic storms:storm commencement, the time at which the storm intensity reaches its maximum values, the storm duration,as well as to the storm amplitude expressed in terms of geomagnetic indeces.      

一个二次可积系统在二次保守扰动下的分支

研究了一个具有同宿轨的二次可积系统在二次保守扰动下的分支现象.此时一阶Melnikov函数恒等于零,必须考虑二阶Melnikov函数,而在一阶Melnikov函数中不起作用的扰动参数在二阶Melnikov函数中却起着非常重要的作用,因此扰动部分极为复杂.在此借助于二阶Melnikov函数的计算公式及理论分析,建立了极限环分支定理,得到了在一阶Melnikov函数恒等于零,而二阶Melnikov函数不恒等于零时,可能分支出的极限环个数最大为2的结论.     

利用RDSS系统测量数据提取电离层TEC参数的研究

提出了一种基于无线测定卫星业务(RDSS)系统观测数据提取电离层TEC参数的方法,利用此方法计算分析了2006年5月地面中心地区电离层垂向TEC的日变化趋势.研究结果表明,利用RDSS系统观测数据提取的电离层垂向TEC,在北京时间每日凌晨0400时左右达到最小值,在午后1400时左右达到最大值,符合电离层TEC参数受太阳活动影响较大的物理规律.结果说明研究方法是可行且有效的,文章还对可能存在的误差进行了探讨.      

Comparative analysis of four different single-frequency PPP models on positioning performance and atmosphere delay retrieval

Single-frequency precise point positioning (SF-PPP) has attracted increasing attention due to its high precision and cost effectiveness. With various strategies to handle the dominant error, i.e., ionosphere delay, the ionosphere-float (IF), ionosphere-free-half (IFH), ionosphere-corrected (IC), and ionosphere-weighted (IW) SF-PPP models are certain to possess different characteristics and performance levels. This study is dedicated to assessing and comparing the four models from model characteristics, positioning performance, and atmosphere delay retrieval. The model comparison shows that IC and IW models are full-rank while IF and IFH models have a rank deficiency of size one that will result in biased estimations, which means the better solvability of IC and IW models. The experiments are carried out based on the 7-day Global Positioning System (GPS) observations collected at 57 global Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) stations and Global Ionosphere Map (GIM) products. The results indicate that the IW model can accelerate SF-PPP convergence and achieve higher positioning accuracy compared to the other three SF-PPP models, especially in kinematic mode. With convergence criteria of 0.25 m in horizontal and 0.5 m in vertical, the east/north/up convergence times of IW model are 0.5/15.0/25.0 min and 0.5/16.0/36.5 min for static and kinematic modes, respectively. The IW model is able to achieve an instantaneous positioning accuracy of 0.28/0.35/0.75 m. In addition, a real kinematic test also demonstrates the best positioning solutions of IW model. Regarding troposphere delay retrieval, the IF, IFH, and IW models obtain a comparable daily accuracy of 3.0 cm on average, while the IC model achieves the worst accuracy of 8.0 cm. For precise ionosphere delay estimation, IW model only needs an average initialization time of 34.3 min, but a longer initialization time of 51.6 min is required for IF model. The daily precision of ionosphere delay estimation for IW model can reach up to 10.8 cm. At the present accuracy of GIM products, it is suggested that the IW model should be adopted for SF-PPP first due to its superior performance in positioning and atmosphere delay retrieval.     

西藏高原 广州地区f0E,f0Es,fbEs的某些变化特征

本文利用西藏、广州地区1985—1988年夏季的7、8月份的实测资料,对电离层特征参数,f_oE,f_oE_s,f_bE_s,进行了统计分析,得到它们的变化规律与特点。 从图1中看出,西藏高原地区的f_oE值,其变化规律,受太阳黑子的影响较大且为正     

IRI-90及其与中国电离层资料f_0F_2的比较

本文介绍了国际参考电离层IRI-90版中新增的内容,比较了它与IRI-86的主要差别。与我国电离层临频数据的统计分析表明,新版本对我国地区的适用程度有了改进。     

Anomalous enhancement of electric field derived from ionosonde data before the great Wenchuan earthquake

The seismo-ionospheric coupling is a hot topic of modern scientific research. One of the most reasonable mechanisms is the hypothesis of quasistatic electric field. With a preliminary analytical method, electric field in F2-region before Wenchuan earthquake was derived from the five lower latitude ground-based ionosondes: Lhasa (29.63°N, 91.17°E), Chongqing (29.50°N, 106.40°E), Kunming (25.00°N, 102.70°E), Guangzhou (23.15°N, 113.35°E) and Haikou (23.15°N, 110.35°E). The results show that there was an anomalous enhancement of electric field in F2-region close to the epicenter with maximal amplitude ∼2 mV/m (about 10 times of the background) at 15:00 LT on 9 May, which is in line with the amplitudes of anomalous electric field related to some previous earthquakes observed by satellites.     

A MLP neural network as an investigator of TEC time series to detect seismo-ionospheric anomalies

Anomaly detection is extremely important for earthquake parameters estimation. In this paper, an application of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in the earthquake precursor’s domain has been developed. This study is concerned with investigating the Total Electron Content (TEC) time series by using a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network to detect seismo-ionospheric anomalous variations induced by the powerful Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011.     

Kalman filter based estimation of differential hardware biases with triangular interpolation technique for IRNSS

Ionosphere delay correction is the main error correction to the computation of single frequency user position using satellite navigation. However ionosphere delay consists of not only delay but also frequency dependent differential hardware biases from satellite and receiver ends. For ionosphere point of view, Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) service area comes in equatorial anomaly region. It is a unique satellite navigation system which operates at L5 and S frequencies and consists of Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and Geo Synchronous Orbit (GSO) satellite constellation. With IRNSS measurements availability, there is a good opportunity to estimate and analyse differential hardware biases with GEO/GSO combination and with equatorial ionosphere variation. In this paper, Kalman filter based estimation with triangular interpolation technique is used to estimate differential hardware biases for all IRNSS satellites and reference receivers at L5 frequency. The standard deviation of the 15?days of daily estimation of satellite differential hardware biases is in the range of 0.32 to 1.17 TECU for all IRNSS satellites. Similarly, the standard deviation of the 15?days of daily estimation varies up to 2.85 and 6.0 TECU for receiver differential hardware biases during calm and stormy period respectively. The ionosphere delay computed using estimated differential hardware biases is compared with Global Ionosphere Map (GIM) data. A rigorous analysis is carried out to study the error in the estimation in terms of input data noise level, satellite constellation and effect of latitude. Our result reveals that over IRNSS service area, there is an exponential increase in the error in the estimation of receiver differential hardware biases with respect to latitude.