Observations of ionospheric convection vortices: Signatures of momentum transfer

Abstract

Several classes of traveling vortices in the dayside ionospheric flow have been detected and tracked using the Greenland magnetometer chain. One class observed during quiet times consists of a continuous series of vortices moving generally anti-sunward for several hours at a time. Assuming each vortex to be the convection pattern produced by a small field aligned current moving across the ionosphere, we find the amount of field aligned current by fitting a modeled ground magnetic signature to measurements from the chain of magnetometers. The calculated field aligned current is seen to be steady for each vortex and neighboring vortices have currents of opposite sign. Low altitude DMSP observations indicate the vortices are on field lines which map to the inner edge of the low latitude boundary layer. Because the vortices are conjugate to the boundary layer, repeat in a regular fashion and travel anit-sunward, we argue that this class of vortices is caused by surface waves at the magnetopause. No strong correlations between field aligned current strength and solar wind density, velocity, or B z is found.