Thermal effects in the ionospheric plasma instabilities including the Farley‐Buneman instability (FBI), the gradient‐drift instability (GDI), and the ion‐thermal instability (ITI) are analyzed, focusing on analytic analysis of the previously obtained general expression of the combined instability growth rate. It is shown that thermal effects lead to generally nonmonotonic behavior of the growth rate with the background electric field
A unified fluid theory of ionospheric electrostatic instabilities is presented that includes thermal effects due to nonisothermal processes for arbitrary ion magnetization, background density gradient, and wave propagation. The theory considers arbitrary altitude within the limits imposed by the fluid and collisional models and integrates the ion‐thermal instability (ITI) with the Farley‐Buneman and gradient‐drift plasma instabilities (FBI and GDI). A general dispersion relation is obtained and solved numerically for the complex wave frequency
- Award ID(s):
- 2028441
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10450013
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics
- Volume:
- 125
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2169-9380
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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