The Key Role of Cold Ionospheric Ions As a Source of Hot Magnetospheric Plasma and As a Driver of the Dynamics of Substorms and Storms

The solar wind has been seen as the major source of hot magnetospheric plasma since the early 1960’s. More recent theoretical and observational studies have shown that the cold (few eV) polar wind and warmer polar cusp plasma that flow continuously upward from the ionosphere can be a very significant source of ions in the magnetosphere and can become accelerated to the energies characteristic of the plasma sheet, ring current, and warm plasma cloak. Previous studies have also shown the presence of solar wind ions in these magnetospheric regions. These studies are based principally on proxy measurements of the ratios of He++/H+ and the high charge states of O+/H+. The resultant admixture of ionospheric ions and solar wind ions that results has been difficult to quantify, since the dominant H+ ions originating in the ionosphere and solar wind are indistinguishable. The ionospheric ions are already inside the magnetosphere and are filling it from the inside out with direct access from the ionosphere to the center of the magnetotail. The solar wind ions on the other hand must gain access through the outer boundaries of the magnetosphere, filling the magnetosphere from the outside in. These solar wind particles must then diffuse or drift from the flanks of the magnetosphere to the near-midnight reconnection region of the tail which takes more time to reach (hours) than the continuously large outflowing ionospheric polar wind (10’s of min). In this paper we examine the magnetospheric filling using the trajectories of the different ion sources to unravel the intermixing process rather than trying to interpret only the proxy ratios. We compare the timing of the access of the ionospheric and solar wind sources and we use new merged ionosphere-magnetosphere multi-fluid MHD modeling to separate and compare the ionospheric and solar wind H+ source strengths. The rapid access of the initially cold polar wind and warm polar cusp ions flowing down-tail in the lobes into the mid-plane of the magnetotail, suggests that, coupled with a southward turning of the IMF Bz, these ions can play a key triggering role in the onset of substorms and subsequent large storms.

Three-Dimensional MHD Modeling of Interplanetary Solar Wind Using Self-Consistent Boundary Condition Obtained from Multiple Observations and Machine Learning

Three-dimensional (3-d) magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) modeling is a key method for studying the interplanetary solar wind. In this paper, we introduce a new 3-d MHD solar wind model driven by the self-consistent boundary condition obtained from multiple observations and the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) machine learning technique. At the inner boundary, the magnetic field is derived using the magnetogram and potential field source surface extrapolation; the electron density is derived from the polarized brightness (pB) observations, the velocity can be deduced by an ANN using both the magnetogram and pB observations, and the temperature is derived from the magnetic field and electron density by a self-consistent method. Then, the 3-d interplanetary solar wind from CR2057 to CR2062 is modeled by the new model with the self-consistent boundary conditions. The modeling results present various observational characteristics at different latitudes, and are in better agreement with both the OMNI and Ulysses observations compared to our previous MHD model based only on photospheric magnetic field observations.

Pressure Profiles in the Magnetosheath under Different Solar Wind Conditions

<p>Magnetosheath is a major interface region between the solar wind and magnetosphere. The changes of solar wind parameters after the bow shock crossing and the phenomena near the magnetopause are intensively studied. However, spatial profiles of different pressure components across the magnetosheath are not comprehensively studied yet, especially in observations. The highly fluctuating sheath, variations of upstream conditions, and permanent motion of the magnetopause and bow shock complicate observational studies. In the present contribution, we use two different methods to obtain a typical magnetosheath profile under specific upstream conditions. One is the superposed epoch analysis of complete crossing events observed by the THEMIS mission. The second method is relocated the THEMIS observations into a normalized magnetosheath coordinate. By contrast to the result of MHD modeling, we found only a very weak difference between pressure profiles for southward and northward IMF. Our results show that the thermal pressure exhibits a peak near the magnetopause that is more pronounced under southward than under northward IMF. The magnetic pressures have a similar trend for both IMF polarities but the magnetic pressure increases faster toward the magnetopause for northward IMF than it does for southward IMF.</p>

Radiation hydrodynamics in simulations of the solar atmosphere

Nearly all energy generated by fusion in the solar core is ultimately radiated away into space in the solar atmosphere, while the remaining energy is carried away in the form of neutrinos. The exchange of energy between the solar gas and the radiation field is thus an essential ingredient of atmospheric modeling. The equations describing these interactions are known, but their solution is so computationally expensive that they can only be solved in approximate form in multi-dimensional radiation-MHD modeling. In this review, I discuss the most commonly used approximations for energy exchange between gas and radiation in the photosphere, chromosphere, and corona.