Comparison between Ionospheric and plasmaspheric TECs measured from JASON satellite: plasmaspheric flux

The plasmasphere is filled with the ions and electron transported mostly from the mid-latitude ionosphere. In the topside ionosphere where the $O^+$ ions are still major ions, the $O^+$ ions are in chemical equilibrium with the $H^+$ ions and exchange their charges with each other's parent atoms with similar rates in both reactions. During the day, the newly produced $H^+$ ions flow upward to fill the plasmasphere while they flow downward and contribute to the maintenance of the ionospheric density at night under the geomagnetically quiet condition. The ionosphere and plasmasphere are coupled by these plasma fluxes and therefore strongly affect each other. In order to study these coupling we utilized the plasma density measurements from JASON satellite. This satellite measures vertical total electron content (TEC) from the ground to the satellite orbit (about 1336 km) and slant TEC from the satellite orbit to much higher GPS satellites by using the on-board dual-frequency altimeter and GPS receiver, respectively. The former measurement can represent the ionospheric TEC while the latter can represent the plasmaspheric TEC in the equatorial region. We compared these data with different seasons, solar activities and local times, and the results will be presented.