Solar Wind Control of the Cusp Aurora for Northward IMF

Details Solar Wind Control of the Cusp Aurora for Northward IMF Solar Wind Control of the Cusp Aurora for Northward IMF

Dec 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agufmsm62a0482b&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2002, abstract #SM62A-0482

Physics

2455 Particle Precipitation, 2724 Magnetopause, Cusp, And Boundary Layers, 2736 Magnetosphere/Ionosphere Interactions, 7835 Magnetic Reconnection

Scientific paper

The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration's (IMAGE) Far Ultraviolet Instrument (FUV) images the auroral oval in doppler-shifted Lyman-alpha. On the dayside, a bright spot poleward of the auroral oval can be seen occasionally. This ionospheric spot can be interpreted as the location of the cusp created by intense proton precipitation through reconnection of magnetospheric lobe field lines for northward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) conditions. In order to deduce the orientation of the IMF with regards to the Earth's magnetic field during such a reconnection process, event conditions were selected between the end of May 2000 to mid-December 2001 during which the IMF was northward, steady, and had an higher than average density and velocity. Of these 344 events, 56 showed a bright spot. The occurrence frequency of a spot appears to be higher for small values of Bx/Bz. For the 56 cases with a bright spot, the spot location was compared with the predicted location of anti-parallel regions using the 1996 Tsyganenko model. The majority of the anti-parallel reconnection sites tailward of the cusp when mapped to the ionosphere coincide with the observed spot. For many of the cases, the solar wind parameters were outside of the Tsyganenko model. This may account for some of the discrepancy between the model and observations. The agreement between the model and observations for the majority of the cases is consistent with the hypothesis that reconnection occurs at anti-parallel regions for northward IMF.

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