Search for dependence of ionospheric parameters on meteorological local storms

In our recent studies, we analysed coherency between the dynamics of tropospheric low-pressure areas on side and stratospheric and ionospheric variability on the other side. We have identified different types of atmospheric frontal movements in the troposphere associated with particular types of echo detected up to the F2 ionospheric layer on the digisonde measurements (ionograms, drifts) and Continuous Doppler sounder spectrograms. We found that, in addition to synoptic patterns of continental scale, disturbances in the ionosphere are caused by fast-moving midlatitudes frontal cyclones.

Another type of tropospheric situation, which especially in the summer causes observable changes in ionosphere parameters, are local storms caused by thermal convection possibly supported by local orography. The response of these storms in the ionosphere is significant despite the fact that they are meteorological phenomena of the subsynoptic scale (horizontal range of the unit km) and their duration does not exceed several hours).

In the present paper we focus on cases of meteorological storms that occurred in the period from 2014 to 2022 during low geomagnetic and solar activity. The selection of storm events was made based on measurements of both aerological data and surface meteorological data. Automatic detection of spread in hight and frequency in ionograms recorded by the DPS-4D digisonde is performed using convolutional neural network coded in python with help of the tensorflow library.