Low Ionosphere under Influence of Strong Solar Radiation: Diagnostics and Modeling

Abstract

Solar flares (SFs) and intense radiation can generate additional ionization in the Earth’s atmosphere and affect its structure. These types of solar radiation and activity create sudden ionospheric disturbances (SIDs), affect electronic equipment on the ground along with signals from space, and potentially induce various natural disasters. Focus of this work is on the study of SIDs induced by X-ray SFs using very low frequency (VLF) radio signals in order to predict the impact of SFs on Earth and analyze ionosphere plasmas and its parameters. All data are recorded by VLF BEL stations and the model computation is used to obtain the daytime atmosphere parameters induced by this extreme radiation. The obtained ionospheric parameters are compared with results of other authors. For the first time we analyzed physics of the D-region—during consecutive huge SFs which continuously perturbed this layer for a few hours—in detail. We have developed an empirical model of the D-region plasma density and gave a simple approximative formula for electron density.