Effective recombination coefficient and solar zenith angle effects on low-latitude D-region ionosphere evaluated from VLF signal amplitude and its time delay during X-ray solar flares

Abstract

Excess solar X-ray radiation during solar flares causes an enhancement of ionization in the ionospheric D-region and hence affects sub-ionospherically propagating VLF signal amplitude and phase. In first part of the work, using the well known LWPC technique, we simulated the flare induced excess lower ionospheric electron density by amplitude perturbation method. Unperturbed D-region electron density is also obtained from simulation and compared with IRI-model results. Using these simulation results and time delay as key parameters, we calculate the effective electron recombination coefficient ($\alpha_{eff}$) at solar flare peak region. Our results match with the same obtained by other established models. In the second part, we dealt with the solar zenith angle effect on D-region during flares. We relate this VLF data with the solar X-ray data. We find that the peak of the VLF amplitude occurs later than the time of the X-ray peak for each flare. We investigate this so-called time delay ($\bigtriangleup t$). For the C-class flares we find that there is a direct correspondence between $\bigtriangleup t$ of a solar flare and the average solar zenith angle $Z$ over the signal propagation path at flare occurrence time. Now for deeper analysis, we compute the $\bigtriangleup t$ for different local diurnal time slots $DT$. We find that while the time delay is anti-correlated with the flare peak energy flux $\phi_{max}$ independent of these time slots, the goodness of fit, as measured by $reduced$-$\chi^2$, actually worsens as the day progresses. The variation of the $Z$ dependence of $reduced$-$\chi^2$ seems to follow the variation of standard deviation of $Z$ along the $T_x$-$R_x$ propagation path. In other words, for the flares having almost constant $Z$ over the path a tighter anti-correlation between $\bigtriangleup t$ and $\phi_{max}$ was observed.