Study of large-scale irregularities generated in the ionospheric f-region by high-power hf waves

Experimental studies of the features of artificial ionospheric turbulence was performed at the "Sura" heating facility in August 1998 using numerous diagnostic tools, such as scintillation, chirp-sounding, backscattering, and stimulated electromagnetic emission (SEE) measurements, as well as sounding a HF-disturbed volume (DV) by probing waves. It has been found that generation of strong artificial large-scale irregularities (ALSIs), which manifest themselves through the F-spread on ionograms, scintillations of the satellite signal propagated through the D V, and amplitude fluctuations of the probing wave sounding the DV, is observed not only for an overdense heating, at fo <_ fOF2, but also at higher frequencies fo > fOF2 >--fuh (here fo is the pump-wave frequency, fOF2 is the critical frequency of the F2-layer for O-mode electromagnetic wave, and fuh is the plasma frequency at the upper-hybrid resonance height). This means that transfer of the pump-wave energy in the plasma due to the development of thermal parametric (resonance) instability, rather than thermal self-focusing instability, plays the key role in the ALSI generation in the case where the O-mode HF wave is used for the overdense heating. This conclusion is also confirmed by the fact that the ALSI generation is suppressed in the gyroharmonic frequency range, which is similar to the well-studied quenching of the doumshifted maximum (DM) in SEE spectra. In this paper, we discuss new ALSI features revealed by the measurements, as well as the limits by which one can control the ALSI spectrum using complex pumping schemes. © 2000 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.