Ionospheric turbulence

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The high-latitude ionosphere is is an important region not only for the applications that rely upon our thorough understanding of the physical phenomena occurring in it, but also because it contains the footprints of processes which originate in the interplanetary space. The primary goal of the present proposal is to address some of the most fundamental questions related to physical processes that can easily be qualified as turbulent and intermittent and which are encountered in the space plasma that is the auroral ionosphere. A substantial fraction of my research shall be devoted to the study of the development of ionospheric turbulence as it occurs in the auroral E and F regions and on its impact on the feedback mechanisms that govern its coupling to the magnetosphere in particular. The proposed studies will investigate how coherent nonlinear ionospheric plasma structures arise, and what kind of impact they may have on the transport properties across the boundaries of interest. We propose to take a close look at the physical mechanisms responsible for the ion outflows that have been observed over the past two decades. To understand thoroughly the O+ outflows into the magnetosphere, we propose to include collisional effects which are height dependent. To a certain extent, ion-ion collisions and charge exchange between O+ and atomic Oxygen have been ignored, and we believe they play an important role at altitude greater than 300 Km. We will also try to put the pieces of puzzle together by linking the micro-scale ionospheric physics to the meso-scale and macro-scale magnetospheric physics.