Revision 1

Accepted · first revision · record

Title: What decides on which nights equatorial plasma bubbles form?
Plain: After sunset, regions of thin plasma called plasma bubbles can rise through the ionosphere near the equator and disrupt GPS and radio signals. On some nights they appear and on others they do not, and forecasting that is not yet possible.
Precise: Identify the controls on the night-to-night occurrence of equatorial plasma bubbles, generated by the generalized Rayleigh-Taylor instability after sunset, including the pre-reversal enhancement of the vertical E x B drift, seeding by atmospheric gravity waves, and thermospheric winds. An answer is a predictive criterion with demonstrated skill for day-to-day occurrence at a given longitude.
Settled by: Forecasts of daily bubble occurrence using observed drifts, winds and wave seeding that achieve high skill over a multi-season data set.
Kind: phenomenon
Answer type: mechanism
References: (empty)
Literature status: open
Status note: (empty)
Posed since: (empty)