Space Weather Influences on the Relativistic Electron Population at Geosynchronous Orbits

Details Space Weather Influences on the Relativistic Electron Population at Geosynchronous Orbits Space Weather Influences on the Relativistic Electron Population at Geosynchronous Orbits

Dec 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001agufmsm42b0839e&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #SM42B-0839

Other

2720 Energetic Particles, Trapped, 2784 Solar Wind/Magnetosphere Interactions, 2788 Storms And Substorms

Scientific paper

Relativistic electrons in the outer radiation belt are often the largest contributors to the total radiation dose deposited in lightly shielded spacecraft electronics for many high altitude orbits. While most of this dose usually comes from electrons with energies around 1 MeV, relatively large electron populations sometimes exist for energies up to about 4 MeV. These electrons can also embed themselves deeply in dielectric and insulating materials in spacecraft, later causing "deep dielectric discharges" that have been implicated in many spacecraft anomalies. Although electron fluxes measured at geosynchronous altitudes display large dropouts on timescales of a few hours, averaging over 24 hours will generally give a good indication of the strength of the outer edge of the electron belt on most days. Such electron fluences characteristically drop sharply during the first day or so of a geomagnetic storm, then rebound strongly, typically peaking several days later and slowly decaying until again perturbed by geomagnetic activity or a high-speed solar wind stream. In this paper, we study the various space weather factors, such as geomagnetic activity and solar wind parameters, that influence in the daily integrated electron fluences from the GOES spacecraft (energy greater than 0.6 and 2 MeV) and other geosynchronous spacecraft. The >2-MeV electron daily fluence measured by GOES is a sensitive barometer of outer belt fluctuations, having ranged over five orders of magnitude in recent years. In particular, we study the conditions that create the large electron fluences often measured during the week or so after a geomagnetic storm and look for correlations between peak fluences and solar wind parameters. We also study some very large geomagnetic storms that subsequently generated surprisingly small peak electron fluences. Finally, we look at behavior during extremely quiet periods when electron fluxes have remained at very low levels for up to several weeks.

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