Abstract
Based on the output data of the magnetogram inversion technique, we analyze the dynamics of the Pedersen ionospheric currents and field-aligned currents (FACs) in the night mesoscale cells of the three main large-scale Iijima and Potemra Regions (R1, R2 and R0) during the expansion phase of the summer and winter substorms. FACs play a key role in the ionosphere-magnetosphere interaction. The continuity equation for the electric current density contains two types of possible feedback within the electric circuit parts that connect Pedersen currents and FACs in each cell. Pedersen ionospheric conductivity is dominant to Type 1, and the electric field dominates in Type 2 feedback. This paper studies both types of physical feedback in mesoscale cells of downward and upward FACs on the night side of the polar ionosphere from the data of two selected substorms of the summer and winter seasons in the northern hemisphere.
Highlights
Investigation of the features of variations in the Earth magnetic field and causing them electric fields and currents in the atmosphere–ionosphere– magneto‐ sphere system is an important component of geodynamics, and of the space weather research, an actively developing discipline of solar‐terrestrial physics in recent years
This paper studies contribu‐ tions of the magnetospheric electric field and iono‐ spheric conductivity to field‐aligned currents (FACs), that flow along geomagnetic field lines and play a key role in the magnetosphere‐ionosphere interaction [Kamide, Baumjohann, 1993]
We study the dynamics of down‐ ward and upward FACs within large‐scale FAC Regions R0, R1, and R2 (Fig. 1), according to the Iijima and Po‐ temra (I‐P) classification [Iijima, Potemra, 1978]
Summary
Investigation of the features of variations in the Earth magnetic field and causing them electric fields and currents in the atmosphere–ionosphere– magneto‐ sphere system is an important component of geodynamics, and of the space weather research, an actively developing discipline of solar‐terrestrial physics in recent years. Our MIT is based on the 1‐minute data of ground‐based geomagnetic measurements on the global network of stations and the dynamic model of ionospheric conduc‐ tivity [Shirapov et al, 2000] It provides calculations for 2D maps of electric potential distributions, in‐. During the sub‐ storm EP onset, increases in the FAC intensity on a large spatial scale (>100 km) are observed, which are characterized by a significant increase in the FAC intensity (by a factor of 2–3) The nature of such strong nonlinear feedbacks in the ionosphere‐mag‐ netosphere system is still poorly studied, and their further investigation is an urgent task for the physics of magnetospheric substorms.
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