Paper#: 104
Poster #:
Session Name: Workshop 5C: Tail Processes
Room: West Ballroom
Day: Thursday
Time: 3:45-4:10 p.m.
Abstract Title: Coupling of Tail Flows to Aurora during Late Substorm Expansion and Recovery
PresentSurname: Angelopoulos, V.
All Authors: V. Angelopoulos, F. S. Mozer, M. Andre, G. Gustafsson, P.-A. Lindqvist, A. Balogh
Abstract : Recent conjunction studies from tail and ionospheric spacecraft (Geotail, POLAR, Cluster) suggest that Alfven waves propagating from the tail to the high latitude ionosphere are responsible for significant amounts of Earthward electromagnetic energy propagation during substorms. The repetitive nature of the phenomenon suggests that it is a semi-permanent feature of the substorm process. While the amount of energy carried by the waves towards low altitudes is small compared to the energy available in the Earthward flows in the tail, its continual nature renders the field-aligned Alfven wave propagation and dissipation a significant loss term in the total energy budget. We present case studies showing the significance of the electromagnetic coupling of tail flows to the aurora and its ramifications for substorm evolution.