Joint observations of a traveling ionospheric disturbance with the Paratunka OMTI camera and the Hokkaido HF radar

Abstract

On 10 September 2007 between 10:00 and 14:00 UT, the OMTI all-sky imager at Paratunka (Kamchatka, Russia, GLAT~52°) observed the onset and south-western progression of a localized depletion region in the airglow intensity. The perturbation, while being stretched in the NW-SE direction, crossed the entire field of view of the camera. During the event, the Hokkaido SuperDARN HF radar was monitoring echoes in the Paratunka longitudinal sector. It was detecting a localized band of ground scatter echoes progressing equatorward synchronously with the motion of the optical perturbation. It is suggested that both features resulted from the onset and south-western progression of a localized region with enhanced electric field that influenced the distribution of the plasma density in the ionosphere. Modeling of the HF ground scatter dynamics based on numerical ray tracing demonstrated qualitative consistency with the observations.