Studying the fine structure of coherent echo spectra using data from Irkutsk incoherent scatter radar

Studying the processes generating different-scale inhomogeneities is one of the challenging problems of ionospheric physics. Plasma instabilities are one of the physical mechanisms by which small-scale inhomogeneities are formed. The main forms of instability in the ionospheric E-layer are two-stream and gradient-drift ones. The inhomogeneities generated by them lead to an abnormally intense radio scattering of different wavelengths (known as coherent echo (CE) or radio aurora) in the E-layer. Therefore, the method of radiowave backscattering is among the widely used methods for studying such inhomogeneities. The CE phenomenon has been investigated most intensely at high and equatorial latitudes, where the conditions for the CE origination are formed rather regularly. For the last decade, CE has also been intensely studied at midlatitudes, where it is observed less frequently and its formation conditions are less known. In 1998–2006, the purposeful studies of the midlatitude CE peculiarities were performed at the Irkutsk incoherent scatter (IS) radar, with a particular emphasis on its coherent properties. It was for the first time found out that the spectra of some data sets had a fine comb-shaped structure, which generated well-known single-humped CE spectra as a result of statistical averaging. In the scope of this study, unique coherent methods for processing individual data sets of CE signals were developed, making it possible to reveal the peculiarities of unaveraged CE-signal spectra. To describe these peculiarities, we proposed a new model of the inhomogeneity spectrum, which is the superposition of the discrete set of spatial harmonics with close wave numbers. The model was shown to adequately describe the scattered signal characteristics observed experimentally.