Thin Filaments in an Average Magnetosphere: Pure Interchange Versus Ballooning Oscillations

Abstract

AbstractThis paper describes magnetospheric waves of very long wavelength in thin magnetic filaments. We consider an average magnetospheric configuration with zero ionospheric conductance and calculate waves using two different formulations: classic interchange theory and ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) ballooning. Classic interchange theory, which is developed in detail in this paper, is basically analytic and is relatively straightforward to determine computationally, but it cannot offer very high accuracy. The eigenfrequencies from the two formulations cover a range of a factor of seven and generally agree with a root‐mean‐square difference between the common logarithms of interchange and MHD frequencies to be ∼0.054. The pressure perturbations in the classic interchange theory are assumed constant along each field line, but the MHD computed pressure perturbations along the field line vary in a range ∼30% in the plasma sheet but are larger in the inner magnetosphere. The parallel and perpendicular displacements, which are very different in the plasma sheet and inner magnetosphere, show good qualitative agreement between the two approaches. In the plasma sheet, the perpendicular displacements are strongly concentrated in the equatorial plane, whereas the parallel displacements are spread through most of the plasma sheet away from the equatorial plane; and can be regarded as buoyancy waves. In the inner magnetosphere, the displacements are more sinusoidal and are more like conventional slow modes. The different forms of the waves are best characterized by the flux tube entropy PVγ.