Simulations of Plasmasheet Electrons in a Model Magnetosphere with AMIE Potentials: Implications for Diffuse Aurora

Details Simulations of Plasmasheet Electrons in a Model Magnetosphere with AMIE Potentials: Implications for Diffuse Aurora Simulations of Plasmasheet Electrons in a Model Magnetosphere with AMIE Potentials: Implications for Diffuse Aurora

Dec 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001agufmsm51a0797c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #SM51A-0797

Physics

2704 Auroral Phenomena (2407), 2716 Energetic Particles, Precipitating, 2736 Magnetosphere/Ionosphere Interactions, 2788 Storms And Substorms, 7843 Numerical Simulation Studies

Scientific paper

We obtain distributions of precipitating electrons by tracing drift shells of plasmasheet electrons in the limit of strong pitch angle diffusion in Dungey's model magnetosphere, which consists of a dipolar magnetic field plus a uniform southward field. Under strong pitch-angle diffusion particles drift so as to conserve an adiabatic invariant Λ equal to the enclosed phase-space volume (i.e., the cube of the particle momentum p times the occupied flux-tube volume per unit magnetic flux). In the past we applied a quiescent Stern-Volland electric-field model with a cross-tail potential drop of 25 kV and added to it a storm-associated Brice-Nishida cross-magnetospheric electric field with impulses to represent substorm effects. For the present study we use the more realistic Assimilative Model of Ionospheric Electrodynamics (AMIE). We use an analytical expansion to express the AMIE ionospheric potential as a function of latitude and magnetic local time. We map this AMIE potential to latitudes >= 50^o to magnetospheric field lines with (L \ge 2.5) in Dungey's magnetic field model. We trace the bounce-averaged drift motion of representative plasmasheet electrons for values of \Lambda corresponding to energies of 0.25-64 keV on field lines of equatorial radial distance r = 6 R_E (L = 5.7), which maps to \approx 65^o$ latitude in the ionosphere. We use the simulation results to map stormtime phase space distributions taking into account loss due to precipitation. We consider 2 models of electron scattering: (1) the limit of strong scattering everywhere, and (2) an MLT-dependent scattering that is less than everywhere strong in the plasma sheet. From the phase space distributions we calculate the total precipitating electron energy flux into the ionosphere. For this study we focus on the October 19, 1998, storm. We compare qualitatively the simulated energy flux with X-ray intensity from Polar/PIXIE images during this storm.

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