The 30 MHz imaging radar observations of auroral irregularities during the JOULE campaign

Coherent backscatter from the auroral electrojet was observed by a 30 MHz imaging radar in Anchorage during the Joint Observations of Upper Latitude Electrodynamics (JOULE) campaign conducted from the Poker Flat Research Range in the spring of 2003. The observations were made at the same time that ionospheric electric fields and plasma number densities were measured in situ by instruments on sounding rockets. Neutral wind profiles were also measured during the campaign from triangulation of chemiluminescent trails from rocket releases. Aperture synthesis radar imaging techniques permit the sorting of the coherent backscatter into small azimuth and range bins and the determination of the scattering altitude. Individual Doppler spectra could thereby be unambiguously associated with in situ electric field measurements in the same small volume. We find that the Doppler shifts of the auroral echoes correspond to the ion acoustic speed times the cosine of the flow angle, where the former is predicted according to an empirical wave heating law. Type I echoes are only observed for very small flow angles regardless of the convection speed.