The planar Langmuir probe (PLP) onboard the Communication/Navigation Outage
Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite has been monitoring ionospheric plasma
densities and their irregularities with high resolution almost seamlessly
since May 2008. Considering the recent changes in status of the C/NOFS
mission, it may be interesting to summarize some statistical results from
these measurements. PLP data from 2 different years (1 October 2008–30 September 2009 and 1 January 2012–31 December 2012) were selected for
analysis. The first data set corresponds to solar minimum conditions and the
second one is as close to solar maximum conditions of solar cycle 24 as
possible at the time of the analysis. The results from the analysis show how
the values of the standard deviation of the ion density which are greater
than specified thresholds are statistically distributed as functions of
several combinations of the following geophysical parameters: (i) solar
activity, (ii) altitude range, (iii) longitude sector, (iv) local time
interval, (v) geomagnetic latitude interval, and (vi) season