Mapping the conjugate and corotating storm-enhanced density during 17 March 2013 storm through data assimilation

Of all the data, six satellites with ionospheric radio occultation profiling capability provided the key altitudinal variation information. The SED associated with the tongue of ionization (TOI) and boundary blob can be well identified from the data assimilation results, although their amplitude of enhancement was only up to similar to 6 TECU (TEC unit, 1 TECU = 10(16) elm(-2)). All structures show very dynamic and complicated time evolution features.

During this storm time, we identified two separate SED/TOI/blob structures corotating from Europe to American with conjugate occurrence. This partly supports the mechanism of convection expansion. Given a significant amount of radio occultation will be available in the near future, this method will help up us to resolve global large-scale ionospheric disturbance down to very small spatial and temporal scale in storm time.