Ionospheric and meteorological response to total solar eclipses

Abstract

Studies concerning solar eclipses have been rising significantly, yet, different circumstances during their occurrence provide uniqueness to every study. This paper studies the ionospheric and meteorological response to the total solar eclipses of August 21, 2017, March 20, 2015 and August 1, 2008. The ionospheric total electron content (TEC) was calculated from the signals beamed by the dual-frequency Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites and accessed from University NAVSTAR Consortium (UNAVCO) data archive. Similarly, the data of meteorological parameters were accessed from the historical climate archive of respective countries. The TEC drop of ∼2–7 TECU with a lag of ∼15–30 min is observed at varying latitudes which correspond with the findings of numerous past research. We analyzed the data of 15 stations under ∼100% obscuration to rule out the varying effects of different obscuration rates. Yet, given the turbulent nature of climate, we found varying changes at observed locations. A good relationship, however, was observed in 8 of the stations, where temperature drop ranged from 0.4 °C to 6.11 °C, and rise in relative humidity ranged from 0 to ∼77%. Wind speed has shown the most turbulent behavior. Their change was largely impacted by the eclipse on 5 of the stations, while the local factor was dominant on the others. In spite of this, the stations under observation showed distinct responses to the ionospheric change during the total solar eclipses, thus demonstrating the relation of meteorological parameters with eclipses.