ALBERT

Description: This paper investigates and quantifies the causes of the Weddell Sea anomaly (WSA), a region near the tip of South America extending from approximately 30° to 120° west geographic longitude and 50° to 75° south geographic latitude at solar minimum between 2007 and 2010. This region is unusual because the midnight peak electron density exceeds the midday peak electron density in summer. This study is far more quantitative than previous studies because, unlike other models, it assimilates selected data parameters to constrain a physical model in order to investigate other aspects of the data. It is shown that the commonly accepted explanation that the WSA is related to the magnetic field declination and inclination effects on the neutral wind does not explain the longitudinal variation of the electron density. Rather, longitudinal changes in the neutral winds and neutral densities are the most likely explanation for the WSA. These longitudinal wind and density changes are attributed to the varying latitudinal distance from the auroral zone energy input. No contributions from the plasmasphere or other sources are required. Furthermore, it is shown that a widely used empirical thermosphere density model overestimates the longitudinal changes in the WSA region.

Description: The distinctive spatial patterns of the ionosphere's total electron content (TEC) response to solar, seasonal, diurnal and geomagnetic influences are determined across the globe using a new statistical model constructed from 2-hourly TEC observations from 1998 to 2015. The model combines representations of the physical solar EUV photon and geomagnetic activity drivers with solar-modulated sinusoidal parameterizations of four seasonal cycles and solar- and seasonally-modulated parameterizations of three diurnal cycles. The average absolute residual of the data-model differences is 2.1 TECU (9%) and the root mean square error is 3.5 TECU (15%). Solar and geomagnetic variability, the semiannual oscillation and the diurnal and semidiurnal oscillations all impact TEC most at low magnetic latitudes where TEC itself maximizes, with differing degrees of longitudinal inhomogeneity. In contrast, the annual oscillation manifests primarily in the Southern Hemisphere with maximum amplitude over mid latitude South America, extending to higher southern latitudes in the vicinity of the Weddell Sea. Nighttime TEC levels in the vicinity of the Weddell Sea exceed daytime levels every year in southern hemisphere summer as a consequence of the modulation of the diurnal oscillations by the seasonal oscillations. The anomaly, which is present at all phases of the solar cycle, commences sooner and ends later under solar minimum conditions. The model minus data residuals maximize at tropical magnetic latitudes in four geographical regions similar to the ionosphere pattern generated by lower atmospheric meteorology. Enhanced residuals at northern mid latitudes during winter are consistent with an influence of atmospheric gravity waves.

Description: Standard processing of seismic events for reporting in bulletins is usually done one-at-a time. State-of-the-art relative event methods, often involving cross correlation, are increasingly used and have improved estimates of event parameters for event detection, location and magnitude. This is because relative event techniques can simultaneously reduce measurement error and effects of model error. We show how cross correlation can be used to assign relative magnitudes for neighbouring seismic events distributed over a large region in east Asia and quantify to what extent the uncertainty in these values increases as waveform similarity breaks down. We find that cross correlation works well for magnitude comparison of two events when it is expected that they generate very similar signals even if these may be almost buried in large amounts of noise. This may be the case when investigating repeating earthquakes or nuclear explosions within a few kilometres of each other. Cross correlation is the optimal detector in these cases assuming noise is white and Gaussian, and also provides the least-squares solution for the relative amplitudes. However, when the waveform similarity of the underlying signals breaks down, due to interevent separation distance, source time function differences or focal mechanism differences, these assumptions are no longer valid and a bias is introduced into the relative magnitude measurement. This bias due to degradation of waveform similarity is modelled here with synthetics and an analytic expression for it is derived based on three terms—the cross-correlation coefficient (CC), and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the larger and smaller events. The analytic expression is a good match to the observed bias in the data. If the equation for relative magnitude is rewritten to correct for the bias due to the CC, a new equation results which is simply the log of the ratio of the L2 norms. The bias due to SNRs is still present because the observed waveforms inevitably contain both signal and noise. However, this bias is predicted to be minimal for typical detection thresholds. Making measurements of the ratio of the L2 norms is shown to remove the bias due to degradation of waveform similarity for real data. The scatter of these cross-correlation measurements of relative magnitude is much less than those obtained by differencing magnitudes in a traditional catalogue. Of 14 025 events in and near China, 34 per cent had over an order of magnitude reduction in the median standard deviation (0.0342 magnitude units) as compared to the estimated scatter in the catalogue (0.3454 magnitude units). And 78 per cent of the events show a factor 3 improvement or better in the precision of relative event size measured as the ratio of the L2 norms as compared to the precision of the catalogue for relative magnitudes. These results suggest that the ratio of the L2 norms is an appropriate measure of relative magnitudes for general seismicity of a monitoring region, when there is significant waveform dissimilarity for neighbouring events. This measure maintains a higher degree of measurement precision as compared to the catalogue.