Plasma drifts and polarization electric fields associated with TID‐like disturbances in the low‐latitude ionosphere: C/NOFS observations

Abstract

Medium‐scale traveling ionospheric disturbances are often observed at the magnetically conjugate points in the nighttime midlatitude ionosphere. It has been suggested that gravity waves disturb the ionosphere and induce electric fields in one hemisphere and that the electric fields are amplified by the Perkins instability and transmitted along the geomagnetic field lines to the conjugate ionosphere, creating similar disturbances there. However, direct observations of electric fields associated with traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs) are very few. In this study, we present low‐latitude TID‐like disturbances observed by the Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite. It is found that ion velocity perturbations are generated in the directions parallel and perpendicular to the geomagnetic field within TIDs. Both the parallel and perpendicular ion velocity perturbations show an in‐phase correlation with the ion density perturbations. For nighttime TIDs, the amplitude of both the parallel and meridional ion velocity perturbations increases almost linearly with the amplitude of the ion density perturbations, and the meridional ion drift is proportional to the parallel ion velocity. For daytime TIDs, the parallel ion velocity perturbation increases with the ion density perturbation, but the meridional ion velocity perturbation does not change much. The observations provide evidence that polarization electric field is generated within TIDs at low latitudes and maps along the geomagnetic field lines over a large distance.