Theory of convective saturation of Langmuir waves during ionospheric modification of a barium cloud

In recent experiments (Djuth, F. T., Sulzer, M. P., Elder, J. H. and Groves, K. M. (1995) Journal of Geophysical Research, 100, 17,347), a parametric decay instability was excited by an ordinarywave HF pump during an ionospheric chemical release from a rocket over Arecibo, PR, which created an artificial ‘barium ionosphere,’ with peak plasma frequency above the pump frequency, and a density gradient with a (short) 5 km scale length. Simultaneous incoherent scattering measurements revealed a strong initial asymmetry in the amplitudes of almost vertically upgoing versus downgoing measured plasma waves. We can account for this asymmetry in terms of linear convective saturation of parametrically unstable plasma waves propagating over a range of altitudes along geometric optics ray paths. Qualitative features of the frequency spectrum of the measured downgoing wave are in agreement with this model, although the theoretically predicted spectrum is narrower than observed. The observed altitude localization of the enhanced spectrum to a few range cells is consistent with the theory.