Visualization and three-dimensional measurements of traveling ionospheric disturbances with the Wallops Island Vipir/Dynasonde system

Results of application of Dynasonde technique to studies of the wave activity in the Thermosphere-Ionosphere system are presented. Data for this study have been obtained with a Vertical Incidence Pulsed Ionospheric Radar (VIPIR) system at the NASA´s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia operating continuously with sounding session periodicity equal to 2 min. A component of Dynasonde data analysis software, the inversion procedure NeXtYZ has been used to attribute plasma density, tilts, and line-of-sight Doppler values to the altitudes in real space with 1 km resolution. The temporal and spatial resolution allow visualization of the phase fronts of the traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs) and measuring full set of parameters (both vertical and horizontal) of TID activity in the upper atmosphere (between the base of the E layer and the maximum of F layer, where the radar´s signal can be reflected by the ionospheric plasma). In addition, our time-domain analysis yields statistics of the directions of propagation of the prevailing TIDs over the Wallops location, and application of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram technique to the tilt data provides useful insight into the dynamics of spectral composition of the TIDs. Dynasondes will be a powerful tool for studying the sources of and propagation of waves in the upper atmosphere.