Abstract
Recent observations of partial penetration of the IMF B y into the magnetosphere (Fairfield, 1979; Cowley and Hughes, 1983) are shown to agree with the idea of a magnetopause current K y , induced by IMF B y (Primdahl and Spangslev, 1983). The slow decay of K y , caused by Joule heat losses in the cusp ionospheres is responsible for the appearance (on the average) of a fraction of IMF B y inside the magnetosphere, and this also explains the large statistical scatter of the data. A decay time constant of 4–5 days is derived from the average fraction of IMF B y observed inside the magnetosphere in good agreement with the 7-day time constant previously proposed.
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