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Science Rendezvous > Posters
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Interaction between the Magnetosphere and the Coupled Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Plasmasphere system
N. Maruyama (1), T. Fuller-Rowell (1), M. Codrescu (2), D. Anderson (1), A. Richmond (3), A. Maute (3), S. Sazykin (4), F. Toffoletto (4), R. Spiro (4), R. Wolf (4), and G. Millward (5)
(1) CIRES, (2) NOAA SWPC, (3) NCAR HAO, (4) Rice Univ., (5) LASP
We have developed a self-consistent first-principles model of the coupled inner magnetosphere- thermosphere- ionosphere- plasmasphere system in order to understand the storm time electrodynamic coupling of the magnetosphere and ionosphere and its consequences for the ionosphere, plasmasphere, and thermosphere.
The model involves electrodynamic coupling of the Rice Convection Model (RCM) and the Coupled Thermosphere Ionosphere Plasmasphere electrodynamics (CTIPe) model: RCM provides the region 2 field aligned currents resulting from pressure gradients in the inner magnetosphere, which are important for modeling electric-field penetration and the shielding processes, while CTIPe provides time-dependent conductivity and neutral wind fields that are key to modeling the disturbance dynamo. A newly developed potential solver takes into account all these inputs to derive the global pattern of ionospheric electric fields.
We found that the storm time vertical ExB drifts from the coupled model provided a better agreement with those from the observations as compared to the previous predictions from the stand-alone RCM and CTIPe. Our simulation results suggest that the temporal variations of the magnetospheric magnetic field play a significant role in the storm time variation of the equatorial ionospheric drifts, especially for intense magnetic storms. As responses of the ionosphere, plasmasphere and thermosphere to the storm time disturbance drifts, we found that an increased upward ExB drift initiated by the penetration process modifies the global distributions of the electron density and zonal neutral wind, leading to the zonal drift disturbances near the terminator through the F-region dynamo process. In addition, our results demonstrate that the penetration and the shielding processes can be altered by the modified conductivity, neutral wind, and field aligned currents that couple between magnetosphere and ionosphere.
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