Determining Ionospheric Drift and Anisotropy of Irregularities from LOFAR Core Measurements: Testing Hypotheses behind Estimation

Abstract

We try to assess the validity of assumptions taken when deriving drift velocity. We give simple formulas for characteristics of the spatiotemporal correlation function of the observed diffraction pattern for the frozen flow and the more general Briggs model. Using Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) Cassiopeia intensity observation, we compare the experimental velocity scaling factor with a theoretical one to show that both models do not follow observations. We also give a qualitative comparison of our drift velocity estimates with SuperDARN convection maps. The article is essentially an extended version of the conference paper: “Determining ionospheric drift and anisotropy of irregularities from LOFAR core measurements”, Signal Processing Symposium 2021 (SPSympo 2021).

Keywords

• drift estimation
• ionosphere
• LOFAR