Fast type-I waves in the equatorial electrojet: Evidence for nonisothermal ion-acoustic speeds in the lower E region

Abstract

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the phase velocity ot large amplitude irregularities produced by the modified two-stream and the gradient-drift instabilities are the same as the threshold speed, namely, the nominal ion-acoustic speed in the modified two-stream case. In this context, it is rather puzzling to note that the phase velocity of type-I waves in the equatorial electrojet is known to easily exceed 400 m/s during strong electrojet conditions. This is puzzling because the ion-acoustic speed of the medium is expected to be 100 m/s slower than these observations. Explaining the observations as an increase in the nominal ion-acoustic speed through much higher neutral temperatures than expected or through electron heating by plasma waves is problematic at best. The first explanation violates everything we know about the neutral atmospheric temperature near the mesopause, while in the latter case, we only have to recall the emerging view that electron heating is done, at high latitudes, by parallel wave fields and that there is no evidence for the existence of such fields in the equatorial case. By contrast, we show that, contrary to what is normally assumed, electron thermal fluctuations cannot be neglected in the theoretical treatment of the instability when the ion collision frequency becomes large compared to the wave frequency and the wave aspect angle is small. These electron thermal fluctuations are caused by electron adiabatic heating and cooling effects related to the wave dynamics. When the electron thermal fluctuations are included in the calculations the derived instability threshold speeds match the upper limit reached by the observations. The increase becomes detectable at 108 km altitude and increases rapidly with decreasing altitude to become roughly 1.5 times as large as the isothermal ion-acoustic speed below 100 km altitude. We show in this paper that the new threshold speed provided by the nonisothermal threshold calculations provides an excellent match for the largest vertical type-I phase speeds that were observed during a very strong daytime electrojet event. Copyright 2003 by the American Geophysical Union.