Decay of polar cap patches

Details Decay of polar cap patches Decay of polar cap patches

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmsm11a1684h&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #SM11A-1684

Physics

[0310] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / Airglow And Aurora, [2419] Ionosphere / Ion Chemistry And Composition, [2431] Ionosphere / Ionosphere/Magnetosphere Interactions, [2475] Ionosphere / Polar Cap Ionosphere

Scientific paper

We report an event in which a polar cap patch was detected with an all-sky imager (ASI) at Resolute Bay, Canada (74.73N, 265.07E; AACGM latitude 82.9) on the nightside. The patch stopped its anti-sunward motion associated with a northward turning of IMF observed by the Geotail spacecraft and stayed within the field-of-view (FOV) of the ASI for more than 1 h. When the patch stagnated within the FOV, its luminosity decreased very gradually, which allows us to investigate how the patch plasma decayed in a quantitative manner. By using the time-series of the patch luminosity, we estimate the loss rate of the patch plasma β to be 1.24 × 10-4 s-1. This value of β can be explained by the loss through removal of O+ with ambient N2 and O2 molecules derived from the MSIS model, if we assume the altitude of the patch to be around 280 km. The assumed height of the patch around 280 km was slightly higher than the nominal value around 250 km. This is probably because the loss process was much faster in the lower-altitude part of the patch; thus, the central altitude of the patch increased as it traveled across the dark polar cap ionosphere due to rapid recombination at the bottomside of the F-region. This may suggest that we should employ higher emission altitude when we investigate optical patches transported deep into the nightside polar cap.

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