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Noon ionospheric signatures of a sudden commencement following a solar wind pressure pulse

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-01-24, 10:33 authored by A. Vontrat-Reberac, J. C. Cerisier, N. Sato, M. Lester
Using experimental data from the Cutlass Super-DARN HF radars and from a subset of ground magnetometers of the IMAGE Scandinavian chain, the response of the ionosphere in the noon sector to a solar wind pressure increase is studied. The emphasis is on the signature of the convection vortices and of the Hall currents that are associated with the pair of opposite parallel currents flowing along the morning and afternoon high-latitude magnetic field lines. We show that the sudden commencement is characterised by an equatorward convection, immediately followed (within less than 3 min) by a strong poleward plasma motion. These results are shown to agree qualitatively with the global model of sudden commencement of Araki (1994).

Funding

The CUTLASS SuperDARN radars are supported by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) in the UK, the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki. The research at CETP was supported by Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers (INSU) in France. We thank R. Lepping and K. Ogilvie for providing respectively the Wind solar wind IMF and plasma data through the Coordinated Data Analysis Web (CDAWeb). We thank D. Hardy, F. Rich and P. Newell for the use of DMSP particle data. The IMAGE magnetometer data are provided through the Finnish Meteorological Institute, and the Hermanus magnetometer data are provided through the World Data Center for Geomagnetism in Kyoto.

History

Citation

Annales Geophysicae, 2002, 20 (5), pp. 639-645 (7)

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/Department of Physics and Astronomy

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Annales Geophysicae

Publisher

European Geosciences Union (EGU), Copernicus Publications, Springer Verlag (Germany)

issn

0992-7689

eissn

1432-0576

Acceptance date

2002-01-10

Copyright date

2002

Available date

2017-01-24

Publisher version

http://www.ann-geophys.net/20/639/2002/

Language

en