Abstract
The latitudinal ionospheric response of the three strongest geomagnetic storms of 2015 of the current solar cycle 24 during 16–19 March 2015, 21–24 June 2015 and 19–22 December 2015 is investigated using the total electron content data derived from a latitudinal chain of Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers extending from 70°N to 70°S. The storm time perturbations of the ionosphere during main and recovery phase is presented by the GPS derived vertical total electron content (VTEC) data which is further supported by ionospheric F region critical frequency (foF2) and F region peak height (hmF2) data. We observed symmetrical hemispheric response of the ionosphere during the strongest 17th March (St. Patrick’s Day) storm whereas asymmetrical hemispheric response of the ionosphere during 22nd June and 20th December storm over the Asian-Australian sector. The observations are explained by the combined transport of background inter-hemispheric seasonal wind and storm time disturbed meridional wind and by the global thermospheric compositional variation [O/N2] data.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge Department of Physics, Tripura University for providing infrastructure to carry out the research. The authors are thankful to International GNSS Service, IGS (geoftp01.ucsd.edu/pub/rinex/2015) for GPS TEC RINEX data; IZMIRAN (Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, the Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation), Russian Academy of Sciences for daily foF2 (http://www.izmiran.ru/services/iweather/foF2/) and hmF2 (http://www.izmiran.ru/services/iweather/hmF2/) data. The authors are also thankful to OMNIWeb services (https://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/form/omni_min.html) for solar, interplanetary and geomagnetic index data; World Data Center for Geomagnetism, Kyoto (wdc.kugi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dstdir/) for international quiet and disturbed day’s data; Global UltraViolet Imager (guvitimed.jhuapl.edu/guvi-galleryl3on2) for global [O/N2] maps. The geomagnetic latitudes and longitudes of the stations are converted from corresponding geographic latitudes and longitudes from the website Kyoto (http://wdc.kugi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/igrf/gggm/index.html). The authors would like to thank specially Dr. Gopi Krishna Seemala, Indian Institute of Geomagnetism (IIG) for his help and suggestions for the improvement of the manuscript. This work is funded by DST FIST fund reference SR/FST/PSI-191/2014.
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Paul, B., De, B.K. & Guha, A. Latitudinal variation of F-region ionospheric response during three strongest geomagnetic storms of 2015. Acta Geod Geophys 53, 579–606 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40328-018-0221-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40328-018-0221-4