Polar lacuna on ionograms. E- or F-region processes?

Abstract

Lacuna on ionograms indicate conditions where the usual ionospheric reflections of vertically propagating radio waves transmitted from and subsequently received by an ionosonde are missing over a range of frequencies. Reflections from the lowermost E-region should still be observable contrary to the more usual cases where absorption processes in the underlying D-region removes the low-frequency part of the ionospheric reflections appearing in ionograms. It is emphasized below that lacuna cases related to E-region processes should be distinguished from lacunae related to processes in the F1 and F2 regions. This distinction appears to have been neglected in a recent paper.