ИСТИНА

Our work addresses the study of the response of the atmosphere and ionosphere to a variety of external forcing such as solar flares and particle precipitation. Particle precipitation plays important role in the system of magnetosphere-ionosphere- atmosphere coupling during geomagnetic storms. Using radio tomographic imaging of the ionosphere based on navigational satellite systems (Parus/Transit and GPS/GLONASS) we present and discuss the examples illustrating ionospheric effects caused by particle precipitations detected by DMSP satellites. It is shown that the spatial structure of corpuscular ionization in the tomographic images is qualitatively close to latitudinal distribution of the precipitating particles. The distributions of ionospheric plasma observed during strong geomagnetic disturbances and particle precipitations have multiple extrema and wave-like structures with a spatial scale ranging from a few dozens to a few hundreds of kilometers; the characteristic sizes of latitudinal variations in the corresponding corpuscular flows widely vary from a few degrees to a few dozens degrees latitude. The obtained experimental results are in good agreement with the results of the numeric modelling of the AGW generation by volumetric sources. We also present the comparison of the effects of ionization of the ionosphere by a series of intense X-class solar flares during the 23rd and 24th solar cycles based on the data of satellite navigation and augumentation systems (GPS/GLONASS and SBAS). The analysis shows that the intensity of the ionospheric effects estimated from the variations in total electron content is barely related to the intensity of the X-ray flare for the X-class events. The amplitude of variations in the ionization of the upper atmosphere is mainly controlled by the intensity of variations in solar EUV radiation, which is not always correlated to the X-Ray radiation during flares.