Airglow observations from ELOISE

Abstract

In August and September 2015, the Defence Science and Technology Group (DST Group) undertook the Elevation-scanned Oblique Incidence Sounder Experiment (ELOISE): a unique campaign to observe and characterise mid-latitude ionospheric disturbances across Australia using a large number of measurement systems located at 18 sites spanning the Australian mainland. As part of this experiment, two airglow imagers were deployed in the Alice Springs region co-located with a dense Quasi-Vertical Incidence Sounder (QVIS) subnetwork. Airglow images taken over Alice Springs at 630.0 nm and 557.7 nm are discussed and compared to High Frequency soundings from one baseline of the QVIS network. When strong travelling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs) are present, an inverse relationship is seen between airglow intensity and measurements of virtual height at 2.4 MHz and a correlation is seen between the two airglow measurements. The time lag between the two airglow observations and QVIS virtual height time series over a range of HF frequencies is used to derive characteristics of travelling ionospheric disturbances.