Study of Joule Heating for Small Scale Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling Processes

Details Study of Joule Heating for Small Scale Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling Processes Study of Joule Heating for Small Scale Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling Processes

Dec 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agufmsa72b0526s&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2002, abstract #SA72B-0526

Physics

2407 Auroral Ionosphere (2704), 2411 Electric Fields (2712), 2431 Ionosphere/Magnetosphere Interactions (2736), 2437 Ionospheric Dynamics, 2463 Plasma Convection

Scientific paper

Large scale models and observations determine Joule Heating in the ionosphere using a large scale average electric field which is limited in resolution either due to grid resolution of the model or due to the field of view and the temporal resolution of the observation. Typically these averages are obtained over length scales of several ten to about a hundred kilometers. However, it is well known that the electric field in the vicinity of active discrete Aurora is much larger than a large scale average because it is confined to narrow layers with a length scale of the order of a few kilometers or less. Joule heating is proportional to the square of the electric field such that the total Joule Heating of the average field is always smaller than the heating due to the actual fields. We will present a simulation study of small scale magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling processes where a field-aligned current becomes distorted in the presence of a localized parallel electric field in the acceleration region. The resulting dynamics leads to the formations of thin precipitation layers and to a highly variable and localized plasma flow in the ionosphere. These flows are confined to a few hundred meter to kilometer scale. We will present the model and discuss the implications for Joule dissipation for the actual electric field and for different scale averaged electric fields.

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