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Analysis of the Particle Data

 

DMSP SSJ/4 data have been used primarily in space physics research, monitoring the space environment and space weather forecasting. These data have been used to study the electron and ion features of the aurora (Snyder et al., 1976) and to characterize or model the polar cap (Meng & Kroehl, 1978), the polar cusp (Candidi et al., 1981), the auroral zone (Hardy et al., 1985; Kroehl et al., 1991) and the South Atlantic Geomagnetic Anomaly (Buhmann & Kroehl, 1982).

The interest in DMSP SSJ/4 data in the context of this thesis lies in the direct measurements of particle precipitation in the field of view of the SuperDARN radar at the heights of the E- and F-regions. Any form of particle precipitation will have an influence on the plasma parameters (such as electron density, plasma turbulence and conductivities) which in turn produce effects that can correlate with the radar measurements such as Faraday rotation, scattering cross-section and field-aligned currents (DMSP: Lopez at al. (1991), SuperDARN: Sofko et al. (1995)).





Andreas Schiffler
Wed Oct 9 10:05:17 CST 1996