the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
A technique for volumetric incoherent scatter radar analysis
- Institute for physics and technology, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway
- Institute for physics and technology, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway
Abstract. Volumetric measurements of the ionosphere are important for investigating spatial variations of ionospheric features, like auroral arcs and energy deposition in the ionosphere. In addition, such measurements make it possible to distinguish between variations in space and time. While spatial variations in scalar quantities such as electron density or temperature have been investigated with ISR before, spatial variation in the ion velocity, which is a vector quantity, has been hard to measure. The upcoming EISCAT3D radar will be able to do volumetric measurements of ion velocity regularly for the first time. In this article, we present a technique for relating volumetric measurements of ion velocity to neutral wind and electric field. To regularize the estimates, we use Maxwell's equations and fluid-dynamic constraints. The study shows that accurate volumetric estimates of electric field can be achieved. Electric fields can be resolved at altitudes above 120 km which is the altitude range where auroral current closure occurs. Neutral wind can be resolved at altitudes below 120 km.
Johann Stamm et al.
Status: open (extended)
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RC1: 'Comment on angeo-2022-11', Anonymous Referee #1, 03 May 2022
reply
The paper is expanding on a technique published by Nicolls et al. (2014) by using physical constraints to measure the electric field from ion velocities measured from ISR. The technique seems reasonable and the authors show how the method will work through simulation examples.
The authors deal with the affects of the sensor e.g. finite beam width and range extent of the measurments within equation 10. There can be a time component to this as the plasma moves through the FOV it can move to different resolution voxels. The closest cross beam voxels at 100 km along the north south track are about 5 km. This can be similar to a bluring of the data. Will this result in a major change in the algorithm? I think for the most part it will just be an adjustment to the forward model but it may not be neccesary as you're just measuring velocities and not intrinsic plasma parameters with this technique. Plus the physics based regularization might help mitigate this impact.
Johann Stamm et al.
Johann Stamm et al.
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