EVALUATING THE STATIONARITY OF EQUATORIAL SPREAD-F TIME-SERIES DATA

Spectral analysis of satellite and sounding rocket data has been an im portant tool in understanding intermediate scale equatorial spread-F p henomena. An assumption for these investigations was the stationarity of the time series. Following Matthaeus and Goldstein (1982a) we explo re a method to assess the stationarity assumption quantitatively, illu strating our results with rocket density data from topside spread-F. D ata intervals that span a relatively small fraction of a spread-F 'bub ble' are found to satisfy stationarity if suitable linear detrending i s performed. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.