Peculiar transient phenomena observed by HF Doppler sounding on infrasound time scales

Compared to investigations of the influence of gravity and planetary waves oil the ionosphere, the effects of infrasound (periods from about 0.01 s to several minutes) variations have not been studied very much in the last 20 years. Here we present some recent results on peculiar transient phenomena occurring at infrasound timescales, as observed by HF Doppler sounding in the Czech Republic. After a brief description of the measuring equipment for continuous HF Doppler sounding of the ionosphere, we deal with the observations of short-time transient changes that are observed in the Doppler spectrograms in time intervals of a minute or less, and therefore cannot be observed by ionosondes. First, we present examples of S-shaped traces and examine the diurnal and seasonal variation of their occurrence. We show that S-shape phenomena appear to be concentrated near sunset and sunrise. We also discuss the possible source of these disturbances and their relationship to gravity and infrasound waves. Then we show rare patterns with Doppler shifts corresponding to quasi-linear shape (QLS) phenomena in the time-frequency space. Their slope may be positive or negative. We present some of their properties and discuss the possible origin of such a phenomenon. Several potential sources of QLSs were excluded, such as aircrafts, satellites, bolides, meteors, meteorites, thunderstorms or geomagnetic storms. We speculate that QLSs may correspond to the radio waves in the Z-mode reflected at the upper hybrid resonance frequency. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.