Seasonal and solar cycle variations in the ionospheric convection reversal boundary location inferred from monthly SuperDARN data sets

Solar cycle variations in polar cap area measured by the superDARN radars

[1] We present a long-term study, from January 1996 to August 2012, of the latitude of the Heppner-Maynard Boundary (HMB) measured at midnight using the northern hemisphere Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN). The HMB represents the equatorward extent of ionospheric convection and is used in this study as a measure of the global magnetospheric dynamics. We find that the yearly distribu...

An assessment of the “map-potential” and “beam-swinging” techniques for measuring the ionospheric convection pattern using data from the SuperDARN radars

The SuperDARN HF coherent scatter radars (Greenwald et al., 1995) provide line-of-sight (l-o-s) velocity measurements of ionospheric convection flow over the polar regions of the northern and southern hemispheres. A number of techniques have been developed in order to obtain 2-D plasma flow vectors from these l-o-s observations. This study entails a comparison of the ionospheric flow vectors de...

Dynamic variations at the base of the solar convection zone

We have detected changes in the rotation of the sun near the base of its convective envelope, including a prominent variation with a period of 1.3 years at low latitudes. Such helioseismic probing of the deep solar interior has been enabled by nearly continuous observation of its oscillation modes with two complementary experiments. Inversion of the global-mode frequency splittings reveals that...

Comment on “Ionospheric convection

Dawn and dusk sector comparisons of small-scale irregularities, convection, and particle precipitation in the high-latitude ionosphere

[1] Small-scale ionospheric irregularities and auroral precipitation are common features of the auroral ionosphere, but their spatial association has not been examined on global scales. In this paper, we compare electron and ion precipitation from individual passes of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) spacecraft with concurrent observations of ionospheric irregularities and pl...