A Possible Approach to the Equatorial Plasma Bubbles Forecasting Problem

Equatorial Plasma Bubbles (EPBs) are large regions of plasma depletion which arise in the nighttime equatorial ionosphere under certain conditions. In the last decades, several advances have been achieved in the knowledge of such extraordinary events, however, the predictability of these depleted structures still continues to be a problem for the space weather research. The forecasting capability is highly desirable, since these plasma depleted structures affects drastically the radio signals causing interferences in telecommunications and also interruptions in the satellite communications. The work presented here offers an alternative possibility to the EPB prediction using numerical simulation associated with Digisonde data. This hybrid approach presents some promising results and possibly may offer an alternative method to the forecast of the EPB events.