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

Abstract. 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 derived using the "map-potential", and "beam-swinging" techniques with the vectors derived using the "merging" technique. The merging technique is assumed to be the most accurate method of deriving local flow vectors from l-o-s velocities. We can conclude that the map-potential model is significantly more successful than the beam-swinging technique at estimating both the magnitude and the direction of the large-scale ionospheric convection flow vectors. The quality of the fit is dependent on time of day, with vectors observed at low latitudes in the dawn sector agreeing most closely with the merged vector flow pattern.

Key words. Ionosphere (plasma convection; instruments and techniques) – Radio science (instruments and techniques)