This grant supports work on several aspects of ionospheric and magnetospheric physcis. Turbulence models developed for the equatorial ionosphere will be extended to the more complex geometry of the polar ionosphere. The density gradient along the polar magnetic field is likely to make the turbulence in the polar ionosphere more 3-dimensional rather than 2-dimensional considered earlier. This is borne out by observations of the radar backscattered spectrum of the irregularities in the polar ionosphere. In addition, work will be done on the anomolous heating of electrons reported in the polar ionosphere. Because of the high electric fields present in the polar ionosphere existing theories developed by the PI and others require re- examination to include nonlinear effects. A third project will address renormalization group analysis of drift-wave and E x B turbulance. A powerful tool employing renormalization group analysis (RNG) has been recently developed for the study of fully developed turbulence. One of the important applications is the derivation of exact algorithms for subgrid modelling for numerical computation. In any numerical computation of a set of partial differenial equations for a problem on the geophysical scale length, the degrees of freedom are enormously large and freedom must be severely reduced for actual computation on even the largest supercomputers. The central issue is how to make such a reduction without losing the essential physics. In connection with another project the PI has already developed a RNG based subgrid model for Alfven wave turbulence. For ionospheric physics, the PI is developing RNG based subgrid models for drift-wave turbulence and E x B turbulence prevalent in E and F regions.
