The IMF dependence of the local time of transpolar arcs

Details The IMF dependence of the local time of transpolar arcs The IMF dependence of the local time of transpolar arcs

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufmsm51d..08f&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #SM51D-08

Physics

[2407] Ionosphere / Auroral Ionosphere, [2704] Magnetospheric Physics / Auroral Phenomena, [2736] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetosphere/Ionosphere Interactions, [2744] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetotail

Scientific paper

Transpolar arcs or polar cap arcs are auroral features which are observed within the polar cap. They occur predominantly during intervals of northward IMF (Berkey et al., 1976). There is mixed evidence for IMF BY control of the local time at which the arcs initially form; Gussenhoven (1982) found that polar cap arcs formed preferentially post-midnight when BY < 0 (evaluated over 1 or 2 hours preceding the start of the arc) and pre-midnight when BY > 0, whereas Valladares et al (1991) found no clear dependency. The only previous statistical study of globally-imaged transpolar arcs (Kullen et al., 2002) found differing results for moving and non-moving arcs, concluding that three different models were required to identify (i) moving arcs, (ii) stationary arcs near the dawn/dusk portion of the main oval, and (iii) stationary arcs in the midnight sector. In this presentation, we show the results of a statistical study of 131 transpolar arcs observed by the FUV cameras on the IMAGE satellite between June 2000 and September 2005. We find that arcs tend to form following the same dependency on BY as identified by Gussenhoven (1982), whether moving or not. We find that the correlation between the magnetic local time at which the arc forms and the IMF BY component is relatively weak if the IMF is only averaged over the hour preceding the arc formation, but becomes stronger if the IMF is evaluated between 1 and 4 hours before the arc first forms. This is consistent with the timescale that is expected for newly-opened magnetospheric flux to reach the magnetotail plasma sheet (Dungey, 1961; Milan et al., 2007), and is therefore consistent with the suggestion that transpolar arcs map to the plasma sheet. We suggest that the similar dependence of stationary and moving arcs on the IMF BY component might imply that it is possible to explain both types of arc in terms of a single mechanism.

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