Tuesday

A generalised (mechanical) view of Joule heating in the ionosphere is its equivalence to frictional heating arising from ion-neutral collisions. Under this assumption, the temperature increase due to Joule heating can be approximated from the relative flow of the ion and neutral wind velocities. In the case of the latter, there is a known disparity between ground-based instruments and satellite measurements, which will directly affect the calculation of the Joule heating height distribution. We present a case study comparing the averaged Joule heating pattern in the northern hemisphere polar region for the winter 2007-8 period derived from UCL Svalbard and Kiruna Fabry-Pérot interferometers (FPI) neutral winds from Doppler shifts and neutral winds derived from the CHAllenging Minisatellte Payload (CHAMP) accelerometer, with SuperDARN providing the analogous ion velocities for the FPIs and CHAMP. The UCL Coupled Middle Atmosphere Thermosphere general circulation model (CMAT2) is used to provide a base distribution for comparison.

MIST submission (student)