The N Dimensional Lomb Scargle Periodogram for Characterizing Ionospheric Irregularities

The ionosphere is a region of space between ~100 and ~1000 km in altitude consisting of a lightly-ionized plasma. It has many small-scale structures that are often not well-represented in models. We have developed a novel numerical analysis technique called the N Dimensional Lomb Scargle Periodogram (ND LSP) with which to characterize these small-scale structures. We use this technique on a dataset consisting of over 1,000 hand scaled ionograms from 12 separate iononsondes in Australia. We find and characterize many Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (TIDs) as well as estimate the portion of the irregularity power spectrum that is spatially and temporally coherent as opposed to incoherent.