Seasonal Characteristics of the Longitudinal Wavenumber-4 Structure in the Equatorial Ionospheric Anomaly

Abstract

Using the global total electron contents (TEC) measured by the TOPEX satellite from Aug. 1992 to Oct. 2005, we investigate the variations of the longitudinal wavenumber-4 (LW-4) structure in the equatorial anomaly (EA) crests with season, local time, and solar activity. Our study shows that the LW-4 structure in the EA crests (5~20 degrees) MLAT in both hemispheres) has clear four peaks at fixed longitude sectors during the daytime for both equinoxes and June solstice. In spite of being called a wavelike structure, however, the magnitudes and spatial intervals of the four peaks are far from being the same or regular. After sunset, the four-peak structure begins to move eastward with gradual weakening in its amplitude during equinoxes and this weakening proceeds much faster during June solstice. Interestingly, the longitudinal variations during December solstice do not show clear four-peak structure. All these features of the LW-4 structure are almost the same for both low and high solar activity conditions although the ion densities are greatly enhanced from low to high solar activities. With the irrelevancy of the magnetic activity in the LW-4, this implies that the large changes of the upper atmospheric ion densities, one of the important factors for ion-neutral interactions, have little effect on the formation of the LW-4 structure. On the other hand, we found that the monthly variation of the LW-4 is remarkably similar to that of the zonal component of wavenumber-3 diurnal tides at low latitudes, which implies that the lower atmospheric tidal forcing, transferred to the upper atmosphere, seems to have a dominant role in producing the LW-4 structure in the EA crests via the E-region dynamo.

Keywords

• equatorial ionosphere
• equatorial anomaly
• total electron content (TEC)
• tidal winds
• upper and lower atmospheres coupling