Earth surface distribution of a low frequency field strength generated in a disturbed region of the low ionosphere.

 

A. V. Moshkov, V. N. Pozhidaev

Kotel'nikov Institute of Radio-engineering and Electronics of RAS, Mokhovaya 11-7, Moscow 125009, Russia

 

The paper is received on October 12, 2017

 

Abstract. Modern scientific programs for studying the Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere usually include injec­tion of low-frequency (LF) electromagnetic waves into these plasma media. Note that the development of high-power ground antennas radiating upward is hampered because of rel­atively large dimensions of such antennas and rather high conductivity of ground at low frequencies. This circumstance has leaded to building in the late 1960s of Siple Antarctic station located on thick ice substrate. However, at present, the technology of formation of LF sources on the basis of demodulation of high-power short-wave radiation of ground-based transmitters located in North polar regions is preferable. Modern station acting on the ionosphere is a system that can not only act intensively on the ionospheric plasma but also control the conditions and parame­ters of this action. Currently, the EISCAT (Norway) and HAARP (Alaska) heating facilities are the most powerful and best equipped with scientific control instruments. It can be shown that, in the first approximation, this antenna is equivalent to an electric dipole oriented from the east to the west in the geomagnetic coordinate sys­tem. Some part of the radiation of such an antenna passes into the upper ionosphere and magnetosphere. Another part of the LF radiation enters a spheri­cal cavity formed by the lower boundary of the iono­sphere and the Earth's surface (the so-called Earth-ionosphere wave guide). In this spherical wave channel, LF waves can propa­gate through distances of about several thousand kilo­meters; these waves are recorded by ground-based receiving instruments. The objective of this paper is to numerically estimate the struc­ture and strength of the demodulated LF radiation propagated in the wave guide for the case of HAARP transmitter operation modes. It is shown that the Earth-ionosphere guide has a very low electromagnetic connectivity with an ionosphere sources in a frequency range 1…5 kHz due to relatively high optical density of the ionosphere plasma in this range. A wave guide field strength decays with rate ~10…15 dB per 100 km on distances about 100…200 km from the field strength earth distribution maxima. In a distance ~500 km this decay rate has a “traditional” value 1…2 dB per 1000 km average field strength value is several mkV/m.

Key words: high-latitude ionosphere, heating facility, demodulated low-frequency waves, ray tracing.

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For citation:

A. V. Moshkov, V. N. Pozhidaev. Earth surface distribution of a low frequency field strength generated in a disturbed region of the low ionosphere. Zhurnal Radioelektroniki - Journal of Radio Electronics, 2017, No. 10. Available at http://jre.cplire.ru/jre/oct17/11/text.pdf. (In Russian)