VHF scintillations, orientation of the anisotropy of F-region irregularities and direction of plasma convection in the polar cap

摘要

Scintillation data recorded at the polar cap stationBarentsburg are shown to occasionally exhibit two or more peaks in thelatitudinal profiles of the amplitude dispersion. Comparison with concurrentSuperDARN radar convection maps indicates that multiple peaks occur whenBarentsburg is located within the area of strong changes in the plasma flowdirection. When parameters of the ionospheric irregularities are inferredfrom the scintillation data, the orientation of the irregularity anisotropyin a plane perpendicular to the magnetic field is found to coincide wellwith the × flow direction, individually for each peak of the scintillationdata. The differences were found to be mostly less than 20° for a dataset comprised of 104 events. The conclusion is made that analysis ofscintillation data allows one to infer the direction of plasma flow with a certain degree of detail.