A one-year dataset spanning March 2011-March 2012 of coincident observations of night time thermospheric zonal neutral winds, equatorial plasma bubble (EPB) velocities, and zonal plasma drifts are used to examine the relationship between the thermosphere and ionosphere near the geomagnetic equator over Peru. Thermospheric neutral winds are determined by using a bistatic Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI) experiment located at Merihill and Nazca in Peru. The ambient plasma drift velocities were obtained using the incoherent scatter radar at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory in Peru. The EPB zonal velocities were estimated utilizing images of the OI 630.0-nm emission recorded by a narrow-field optical imaging system at the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory in Chile. The joint analysis of these datasets illustrates that the night time and night-to-night variations in the zonal neutral wi...

The Earth’s equatorial ionosphere most often shows the occurrence of large plasma density and velocity fluctuations with a broad range of scale sizes and amplitudes. These night time ionospheric irregularities in the F-region are commonly referred to as equatorial spread F (ESF) or plasma bubbles (EPBs). This dissertation focuses on analysis of ground-based optical and radar measurements to investigate the development and dynamics of ESF, which can significantly disrupt radio communication and GPS navigation systems. OI (630.0 nm) airglow image data were obtained by the Utah State University all-sky CCD camera, primarily during the equinox period, from three different longitudinal sectors under similar solar flux conditions: Christmas Island in the Central Pacific Ocean, Ascension Island in South Atlantic, and Brasilia and Cariri in Brazil. Well-defined magnetic field-aligned depletion...