Significant Day-time Ionospheric Perturbation by Thunderstorms along the West African and Congo Sector of Equatorial Region

Abstract

The equatorial Congo has been recognized as the most active lightning chimney region in the Globe. Although the perturbation of tropospheric thunderstorms on the lower ionosphere has been noticed in the middle latitudes through their transient lightning electric fields or convective gravity waves, the effects on equatorial ionosphere and the horizontal extent of this perturbation remains a mystery because of the difficulties in extracting the effects due to the sporadic nature of the equatorial ionosphere. Here we present observational results showing solid evidence of deviations in ionospheric total electron content (TEC) and its direction of propagation associated with thunderstorms using the method of polynomial filtering, by utilizing the TEC measured from equatorial Global Positioning System (GPS) Receiver stations along the West African region-Congo Basin. The TEC deviations due to the thunderstorms were found to be mostly propagated in a specific direction from the point of the event, with the highest absolute peak TEC at ~±1.5 TECUs. The internal dynamics of the equatorial ionosphere have been found to be suppressed by large thunderstorm effects during the daytime, with negligible impact at night.