Long-lived artificial ion clouds in the earth's ionosphere

The authors report on two observations made over the Caribbean during the summer of 1991 of barium ion cloud releases, ten hours after the clouds were released. One release was made in the morning twilight, and one in the evening twilight, and each was observed again in the following twilight period by a low light level TV imager and a TV spectrograph onboard a Russian research vessel. These observations were very surprising at the time, but the authors present arguments as to why in retrospect they may not be so unusual in practise. Such cloud releases may provide very sensitive tests of ionspheric convection models