Measurement of three‐dimensional plasma velocities at the Arecibo Observatory

Abstract
An observation scheme is described in which it is possible to measure the three velocity components of plasma drift in the ionosphere by using a single monostatic incoherent scatter facility with a steerable antenna. The scheme involves a least‐mean‐squares fitting of the line‐of‐sight velocity observed in several different directions to what one would compute from a given set of three orthogonal velocity components. The method is applied to data gathered at the Arecibo Observatory and is shown to be capable of providing velocity information with rms errors of better than 10 m sec−1 for all three components with a time resolution of 20 min.

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