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Geomagnetic and solar activity dependence of ionospheric upflowing O+: FAST observations

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Abstract

This paper investigates the dependence of the occurrence frequency of ionospheric upflowing oxygen (O+) ions on the sunspot cycle and geomagnetic activity. We examine the upflows response to the geomagnetic disturbances as well as the influence of the ion energy factor in controlling the magnitude of the occurrence frequency and the net energy flux. We discuss the spatial distribution of the upflow occurrence frequency and construct a regression model as a function of the magnetic latitude. The results show an overall enhancement of the upflow occurrence frequency during magnetically disturbed periods and indicate that the high-occurrence area spreads out from the source regions during magnetically quiet periods. The high-occurrence areas are located at 70° magnetic latitude (mLat) in the dayside auroral oval zone and between 76–80° mLat in the dayside polar cusp region. In the nightside auroral oval zone, these areas are near 60° mLat, penetrating further equatorward to 55° mLat during magnetically disturbed periods. High energy (≥1 keV) upflowing ions are common in the nightside auroral oval zone while low energy (<1 keV) upflowing ions are found escaping from the high latitude dayside cusp region. A Gaussian function is shown to be a good fit to the occurrence frequency over the magnetic latitude. For high energy upflowing O+ ions, the occurrence frequency exhibits a single peak located at about 60° mLat in the nightside auroral oval zone while for low energy upflowing O+ ions, it exhibits two peaks, one near 60° mLat in the auroral oval zone and the other near 78° mLat in the cusp region. We study the solar activity dependence by analyzing the relationship between the upflow occurrence frequency and the sunspot number (\(R_{Z}\)). The statistical result shows that the frequency decreases with declining solar activity level, from ∼30 % at solar maximum to ∼5 % at solar minimum. In addition, the correlation coefficient between the occurrence frequency and \(R_{Z}\) is 0.9.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Goddard Space Flight Center for the FAST data, the data is obtained from the CDAWeb interface at http://cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eval1.cgi. We are grateful to Prof. H. Korth for his great effort in preparing the Geopack DLM. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China grants 41174165 and 61572015, the Startup Foundation for Introducing Talent of NUIST (2243141501052), and the innovation project of graduate education in Jiangsu province (CXLX13-501, 201410300081).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Space Weather, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    K. Zhao & Y. Jiang

  2. School of Mathematics & Statistics, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    K. W. Chen

  3. Shanghai Institute of Meteorological Science, Shanghai Meteorological Bureau, Shanghai, 200030, China

    L. F. Huang

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Zhao, K., Jiang, Y., Chen, K.W. et al. Geomagnetic and solar activity dependence of ionospheric upflowing O+: FAST observations. Astrophys Space Sci 361, 295 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-016-2872-3

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