The Ionosphere: Sounding and Probing the "Dirty" Dynamic Turbulent near-Earth Plasma

The Earth's ionosphere is the part of our planet's atmosphere sensibly ionized by the solar radiation, at heights larger than 50 km, grossly up to 1000 km, where the atmosphere is completely ionized and it changes its name into protonosphere, or plasmasphere. The ionosphere is the inner-most part of the complex of dierently ionized regions of the near-Earth space, and its relevance to human activities (e.g., radio propagation, positioning, navigation) has been known since Guglielmo Marconi's discovered it in 1901.In this presentation a taste will be given of the most appealing characteristics of the Earth's ionosphere as a dynamical system in its own right.A short introduction of its fundamental parts and space-time behaviour is presented; then, a panoramic discussion is proposed about how radio sounding and in situ measurements may be of help in investigating the properties of complexity and irregularity of the ionospheric dynamics and morphology.