Electron content modelling: The significance of protonospheric contents

The principal advance of the ATS-6 satellite beacon experiment was the ability to deduce continuously the electron content along the entire slant path from ground-based measurements of the signal group delay. This feature has been exploited in conjunction with the more usual Faraday rotation technique to separate the total electron content into ionospheric and protonospheric components. The physical validity of the deduced quantities is investigated using a mathematical model of the plasmasphere in which integration of the time-dependent continuity and momentum equations for oxygen and hydrogen ions along selected L shells yields the ion concentrations and field-aligned fluxes. The ion concentrations are then integrated along the propagation path to various ground stations from ATS-6 to give computed values for comparison with observations. The mathematical model is used with different sets of atmospheric parameters to investigate the significance of ionospheric and protonospheric contents as derived from beacon data.The calculated electron concentrations are able to reproduce mid-latitude equinoctial electron content observations. The shape parameters τ and F can also be simulated by day, but night-time values do not match the observations well, a greater protonospheric content being required. The calculations show that the quantity N_p, which is readily derived from ATS-6 observations, may be interpreted as the slant H⁺ content above some fixed height in the case of some stations (but not others) if the plasmasphere is reasonably full. The total slant content of H⁺ is approx. twice the value of N_p, though it appears that for the Lancaster raypath a closer relationship exists between N_p and the H⁺ tube content at L = 1.8. In general,N_p is most closely related to the tube content for an L value slightly greater than the minimum L intersected along the raypath.