The Distribution of Small‐Scale Irregularities in the E‐Region, and Its Tendency to Match the Spectrum of Field‐Aligned Current Structures in the F‐Region.

We associate new data from icebear, a coherent scatter radar located in Saskatchewan, Canada, with scale‐dependent physics in the ionosphere. We subject the large‐scale icebear 3D echo patterns (treated as 2D point clouds) to a data analysis technique hitherto never applied to the ionosphere, a technique that is widely applied in cosmological red‐shift surveys to characterize the spatial clustering of galaxies. The technique results in a novel method to calculate the spatial power spectral density of the greater ionospheric irregularity field. We compare results from this method to in‐situ plasma density and magnetic field observations from the Swarm mission. We show that there is a remarkable similarity between echo clustering spectra in the E‐region and the field‐aligned current structuring spectrum observed in the F‐region: a clear and characteristic preferred scale (5 km) both in the E‐ and F‐region spectra. We discuss the possibility that this represents evidence of an energy injection into the ionospheric irregularity field via energetic particle precipitation, but offer alternative interpretations with wider connotations for the ionosphere‐magnetosphere system. These findings open new and promising avenues of research for the study of the location of ionospheric scatter echoes with 3D information. It constitutes a novel way to consider the pattern of ionospheric irregularities over wide fields of view when there is an abundance of radar echoes, which allows for the analysis of radar data as point clouds. Plain Language Summary: With the advent of precision radar data from the aurora containing detailed information about radar echo locations, we are in a position to apply statistical methods from cosmology to extract information about plasma turbulence in the ionosphere. This interdisciplinary paper presents some birds‐eye view discussions about the use of correlation functions in physics, showing how it can be used to understand physics on virtually all spatial scales in the observable universe. We present results pertinent to the ionosphere, shedding light on plasma turbulence and its relation to energetic particles in the aurora. Here, we use observations both from space, by the orbiting satellites in the European Space Agency's Swarm mission, and using an experimental auroral radar in Saskatchewan, Canada. Key Points: Clustering Statistics are used to extract large scale turbulence information from 3‐m structures in the E‐regionE‐region clustering spectra are remarkably similar to in‐situ spectra from field‐aligned currents in the F‐regionA preferential 5‐km scale is simultaneously observed in the E‐region and in the F‐region field‐aligned currents [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]