Jicamarca incoherent scatter observations during the march 1970 storm

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to report on ionospheric observations taken at Jicamarca (lº N Magnetic Latitude) during the March 8, 1970 magnetic storm. This report includes measurements of the electron density, electron temperature and vertical drift (or E-W electric field) for the 7, 8 and 9 of March 1970. These measurements are complemented by C-4 ionograms and magnetic field measurements taken at the Huancayo Observatory which is located at the same magnetic latitude 100 km east from the Jicamarca Observatory. We are including Huancayo AH magnetograms to illus­trate our discussion. The data reported here are still under study and it is being reported in response to the re­quest of the World Data Center A, Upper Atmosphere Geophysics, in its effort to gather world-wide data taken during the magnetic storm in a single publication. Therefore, we shall present the ex­perimental facts limiting our discussion and conclusions to those which can be ,derived from simple inspection of the records. The techniques used to gather the data have been reported previously. The electron densities have been obtained using the Faraday rotation method and the electron temperatures using the cross correlation technique, both systems have been described by Farley [1969a,b). The technique to obtain the vertical drift (E-W electric field) is described by Woodman and Hagfors [1969). The three parameters were measured almost simultaneously. We do not have quiet day measurements of density and temperature sufficiently close to the day of the storm to be taken as a control day. The reader will have to refer to the statistical be­havior of these parameters as measured at Jicamarca and reported by J. P. McClure, D. T. Farley and R.Cohen ll970J and J. P. McClure [1970). We have included here the statistical behavior of verti­cal drifts for the same season taken from Woodman [1970).