Lightning Effects in the Ionosphere Over The Arecibo Observatory

In the last couple of decades, substantial research has been dedicated to understanding the coupling between atmospheric regions. Research on transient luminous events (TLEs) appeared and quickly intensified with the promise of TLEs serving as an optical remote sensing tool of the mesosphere and lower ionosphere. However, to date it remains challenging to obtain quantitative estimates of electron density changes in the ionospheric D region due to underlying lightning and thunderstorms. Arecibo’s incoherent scatter radar (ISR) capabilities for measuring ionospheric electron density with high resolution (300-m spatial resolution in the present study), combined with its tropical location in a region of high lightning incidence rates, indicate a potentially transformative pathway to address this problem. Through a systematic survey, we show that sudden electron density changes registered by Arecibo’s ISR during thunderstorm times are on average different than the ones happening during fair weather conditions (driven by other external factors). Electron density changes happening coincidentally with lightning activity have typical amplitudes of 10–90% between 80–90 km altitude, and in a selected number of cases can be reasonably correlated to underlying lightning activity.