What are Sawtooth Events?

Details What are Sawtooth Events? What are Sawtooth Events?

Dec 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agufmsm31b1223s&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #SM31B-1223

Other

2409 Current Systems (2708), 2463 Plasma Convection, 2736 Magnetosphere/Ionosphere Interactions, 2704 Auroral Phenomena (2407), 2778 Ring Current, 2784 Solar Wind/Magnetosphere Interactions, 2788 Storms And Substorms

Scientific paper

Sawtooth events are quasi-periodic, large-amplitude flux oscillations with a periodicity of 2-4 hours often seen during storms when the ring current is enhanced. They are driven by moderate (|-Bz| < 10nT) and steadily southward IMF conditions. The oscillations have been termed `sawtooth events' because their shape -- a series of slow flux decreases followed by rapid increases -- resemble the teeth of a saw blade. The `sawtooth' shape is particularly well-defined in the high energy proton channels. At geosynchronous orbit, each tooth is associated with strong stretching and dipolarization of the B-field and, while this activity is typically strongest on the night-side, it can also extend well into the day-side for larger sawtooth events. An abrupt recovery in Sym-H is typically observed in association with each dipolarization and each tooth is associated with dispersed particle injections and pre-midnight sector auroral substorm onsets Nevertheless, the auroral activity rapidly engages a wider than usual azimuthal range and the injections can also be dispersionless over a wider than usual range of MLTs. Thus, despite the many similarities to substorms, the more distributed (in local time) nature of sawtooth events has led to an on-going debate as to whether or not they really are substorms. Here, we compare and contrast the phenomenology associated with a number of individual sawtooth and substorm events. In particular, we present a re-analysis of a well-studied interval of substorm activity (the CDAW-9C interval) and demonstrate that it was also a sawtooth event. We will also present the results of a statistical study showing how substorms and sawtooth events relate to one-another on average.

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