Overwhelming O+ contribution to the plasma sheet energy density during the October 2003 superstorm: Geotail/EPIC and IMAGE/LENA observations

Details Overwhelming O+ contribution to the plasma sheet energy density during the October 2003 superstorm: Geotail/EPIC and IMAGE/LENA observations Overwhelming O+ contribution to the plasma sheet energy density during the October 2003 superstorm: Geotail/EPIC and IMAGE/LENA observations

Aug 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005jgra..11009s24n&link_type=abstract

Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 110, Issue A9, CiteID A09S24

Physics

26

Magnetospheric Physics: Plasma Sheet, Magnetospheric Physics: Magnetic Storms And Substorms (7954), Magnetospheric Physics: Magnetotail, Magnetospheric Physics: Ring Current

Scientific paper

We studied dynamics of O+ ions during the superstorm that occurred on 29-31 October 2003, using energetic (9-210 keV/e) ion flux data obtained by the energetic particle and ion composition (EPIC) instrument on board the Geotail satellite and neutral atom data in the energy range of 10 eV to a few keV acquired by the low-energy neutral atom (LENA) imager on board the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite. Since the low-energy neutral atoms are created from the outflowing ionospheric ions by the charge exchange process, we could examine variations of ionospheric ion outflow with the IMAGE/LENA data. In the near-Earth plasma sheet of XGSM ~ -6 RE to -8.5 RE, we found that the H+ energy density showed no distinctive differences between the superstorm and quiet intervals (1-10 keV cm-3), while the O+ energy density increased from 0.05-3 keV cm-3 during the quiet intervals to ~100 keV cm-3 during the superstorm. The O+/H+ energy density ratio reached 10-20 near the storm maximum, which is the largest ratio in the near-Earth plasma sheet ever observed by Geotail, indicating more than 90% of O+ in the total energy density. We argued that such extreme increase of the O+/H+ energy density ratio during the October 2003 superstorm was due to mass-dependent acceleration of ions by storm-time substorms as well as an additional supply of O+ ions from the ionosphere to the plasma sheet. We compared the ion composition between the ring current and the near-Earth plasma sheet reported by previous studies and found that they are rather similar. On the basis of the similarity, we estimated that the ring current had the O+/H+ energy density ratio as large as 10-20 for the October 2003 superstorm.

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