2011 SuperDARN Workshop
ABSTRACTS
Towards an information theory approach for monitoring the ionospheric convection dynamics
I. Coco, G. Consolini, E. Amata, M.F. Marcucci and D. Ambrosino
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) ? Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Rome, Italy.
abstract. Some features, such as vortex structures often observed through a wide spread of spatial scales, can lead to think ionospheric convection is turbulent and complex in nature. Here, applying concepts from information theory and complex system physics we firstly evaluate the Shannon entropy, S, associated with the polar cap potential obtained from the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) and, then, estimate the degree of complexity of ionospheric convection in different solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field conditions. The aforementioned quantities have been computed starting from time series of the coefficients of different orders spherical harmonics expansion of the polar cap potential, and in different conditions of radar coverage in both hemispheres in order to understand if and when the global entropy variations in the auroral and polar regions can be viewed as a proxy of the energy drivers in the solar wind and the magnetosphere. Some preliminary results are shown using both superposed epoch data sets and particular time series.