Diurnal and seasonal variation in the ion flux in relation to altitude

Plasmas entering the magnetosphere play an important role in altering the global magnetospheric dynamics. As the sun is a source of plasma, so also the Earth’s ionosphere, and both interact at the terrestrial magnetosphere. The Earth’s ion flux, being energised by various mechanism such as joule heating, mirroring, ambipolar electric field, electromagnetic waves etc., are caused to experience an upwelling, and an outflow because of other suprathermal energisation leading to the term “loss of planetary atmospheres”. Using EISCAT Svalbard Radar (ESR) data, this study examines the ion flux variation with respect to altitude. It can be seen from the result that no two days have the same plot even though some exhibited similar pattern. This is due to variability in daily solar radiation. The result also shows that ion fluxes in the high and very high domain (fion ≥ 1.0 × 1014 m-2 s-1), are restricted to altitudes ≥ 300 m. However, the fluxes ranging from 1.0 × 1013 m-2 s-1  ≤ fion  < 2.5 × 1013 m-2 s-1 are phenomena across all altitudes under investigation. The variability experienced here is linked to the seasonal variation in the location of the ESR instrumentation. In this case, high flux is observed during the winter, which might be due to winter anomaly, while less amount of high flux in the summer despite substantial increase in the solar flux during this time. This might be attributed to a decrease in the production rate and an increase in the loss rate, because of more molecular neutral atmosphere in summer.