Remote sensing of localized ion acoustic waves with multistatic passive radar

Abstract

Our goal is to contribute to the understanding of ionospheric E region physics by developing a linear fluid theory of E region plasma density irregularities as well as new experimental techniques for radar remote sensing of these irregularities.We derive a new form of the Farley-Buneman (ionospheric two-stream) instability dispersion relation based on a model of perturbed quantities as spatially localized plane wave packets. The motivation for this work is (1) a desire to understand the instability behavior and resulting radar observations in a new theoretical framework that is "aware" of spatially-localized effects; (2) to investigate the coupling of energy into spatial Fourier components and propagation directions other than those of the instability waves themselves.We also describe our development of a passive VHF radar used to observe plasma irregularities into a multistatic, distributed system capable of performing new experiments. The experiments we describe are "spatially diverse," are the first of their kind with passive radar, and provide an important proof of concept for other scientists in the aeronomy community who hope to implement large-scale versions of distributed, passive radio remote sensing instruments.