Estimating the lower ionosphere height and lightning location using multimode “tweek” atmospherics

• Three techniques are evaluated to find source range and ionosphere height by multimode tweeks.
• Curve-fitting problem for two or more parameters is simplified to one parameter optimization.
• A new technique is proposed based on a nonlinear transformation of tweek waveform.
• Analysis of tweek records shows decreasing ionosphere height with increase of mode number.
• Parameters of the exponential conductivity profile of the ionosphere are estimated by tweeks.

There is proposed a new method of estimating the effective ionospheric height of the Earth–ionosphere waveguide and the propagation distance of tweek-atmospherics. It is based on the compensation of waveguide frequency dispersion of a tweek signal, which enables us to improve the accuracy of deducing the cutoff frequencies, especially in the presence of noise. An approach to solve the inverse problem is suggested that reduces the task of finding both the source range and the waveguide cutoff frequencies by using the multimode characteristics of tweeks to an issue of one-dimensional optimization. Based on the numerical modeling of multimode tweek-atmospherics in the Earth–ionosphere waveguide with exponential vertical conductivity profile of the lower ionosphere, it was shown that the accuracy of estimating the effective waveguide height by the new method is good as about 100–400 m for the first and higher order modes. It then allows us to estimate the parameters of vertical conductivity profile of the lower ionosphere for a wide range of source distances from a few hundred to a few thousand kilometers, as long as two or more tweek harmonics can be detected. Preliminary analysis of experimental tweek records show a decrease of the effective height with increasing the mode number, and the scale height of the exponential vertical conductivity profile for the isotropic lower ionosphere model is estimated to be in a range of 0.4–2.5 km.