A comparative study on chaoticity of equatorial/low latitude ionosphere over Indian subcontinent during geomagnetically quiet and disturbed periods

Abstract. In the present study, the latitudinal aspect of chaotic behaviour of ionosphere during quiet and storm periods are analyzed and compared by using GPS TEC time series measured at equatorial trough, crest and outside crest stations over Indian subcontinent, by employing the chaotic quantifiers like Lyapunov exponent (LE), correlation dimension (CD), entropy and nonlinear prediction error (NPE). It is observed that the values of LE are low for storm periods compared to those of quiet periods for all the stations considered here. The lowest value of LE is observed at the trough station, Agatti (2.38° N, Geomagnetically), and highest at crest station, Mumbai (10.09° N, Geomagnetically) for both quiet and storm periods. The values of correlation dimension computed for TEC time series are in the range 2.23–2.74 for quiet period, which indicate that equatorial ionosphere may be described with three variables during quiet period. But the crest station Mumbai shows a higher value of CD (3.373) during storm time, which asserts that four variables are necessary to describe the system during storm period. The values of non linear prediction error (NPE) are lower for Agatti (2.38° N, Geomagnetically) and Jodhpur (18.3° N, Geomagnetically), during storm period, compared to those of quiet period, mainly because of the predominance of non linear aspects during storm periods The surrogate data test is carried out and on the basis of the significance of difference of the original data and surrogates for various aspects, the surrogate data test rejects the null hypothesis that the time series of TEC during storm and quiet times represent a linear stochastic process. It is also observed that using state space model, detrended TEC can be predicted, which reasonably reproduces the observed data. Based on the values of the above quantifiers, the features of chaotic behaviour of equatorial trough crest and outside the crest regions of ionosphere during geomagnetically quiet and disturbed periods are briefly discussed.