First comparison of traveling atmospheric disturbances observed in the middle thermosphere by global-scale observations of the limb and disk to traveling ionospheric disturbances seen in ground-based total electron content observations

While these two phenomena are believed to be connected, they may not have a one-to-one correspondence as the geomagnetic field influences the TID but has no direct impact on the TAD. The relative amplitudes of the perturbations seen in the ionosphere and atmosphere have been observed but rarely together.

This study reports results from a 3-day campaign to observe TIDs and TADs simultaneously over a broad latitudinal region over the eastern United States using a combination of Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) and a distributed network of ground-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers. These results demonstrate that GOLD and the ground-based total electron content (TEC) observations can see the atmospheric and ionospheric portions of a large-scale traveling disturbance.