Active phase of a substorm as a chain of two types of reconnection: In the closed plasma sheet and in the open tail lobes |
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| Authors: | V Mishin Z Pu L Sapronova A Bazarzhapov Yu Kuz’minykh X Cao H Zhang |
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| Institution: | (1) Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA |
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| Abstract: | The maps of the field-aligned current (FAC) density distribution in the ionosphere obtained by the TIM-2 magnetogram inversion
technique are used to investigate the August 27, 2001 substorm. The open magnetic flux Ψ and intensity J of the substorm current wedge (SCW) have been determined with a step of 1–5 min. The substorm onsets are divided into two
types, PSR (plasma sheet reconnection) and TLR (tail lobe reconnection). The fast expansion tailward of the PSR region is
described as the transition from PSR to PSR+TLR. Assuming that the SCW FACs flow down into the ionosphere from the edges of
the disruption region of the cross-tail dawn-dusk current, several parameters of the disruption region have been estimated.
The disrupted magnetic field has been found to be ∼5% of the undisrupted one for PSR and ∼95% for PSR+TLR. The disturbance
power Q for PSR is an order of magnitude lower than that for PSR+TLR. The abrupt growth of Q during the transition from PSR to PSR+TLR is observed over the entire SCW area from its near-Earth part to the midtail and
distant tail. |
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