Time delay of ionospheric TEC storms to geomagnetic storms and pre-storm disturbance events in East Asia

Abstract Using the TEC data at Beijing (39.61°N, 115.89°E)/Yakutsk (62.03°N, 129.68°E) stations of East Asia regions and relevant geomagnetic data from 2010 to 2017, we have studied the time delay of ionospheric storms to geomagnetic storms and compare it with our previous results of Taoyuan (25.02°N, 121.21°E) station (Zhang et al., 2020). The data shows a well-known local time dependence of the time delay, and seasonal dependences are different at these stations. In addition, there is no correlation between the time delay and the magnetic storm intensity /solar activity, except the time delay of negative storms has weakly negative dependence on the solar activity. Comparing with the results of Taoyuan station which is located at EIA region in East Asia, we find that the time delay increases nonlinearly as the latitude decreases due to different ionospheric backgrounds at these places. Moreover, the pre-storm disturbance events are found to have similar statistical characteristics as the pre-storm enhancement in Europe middle latitudes (Buresova and Lastovicka, 2007). By subtracting the common features of the pre-storm disturbance events, we preliminarily infer that auroral activity might be main driver of the pre-storm disturbance events.