Paper#: 22
Poster #:
Session Name: Plenary
Room: West Ballroom
Day: Thursday
Time: 9:20-9:45 a.m.
Abstract Title: Ionospheric Outflows and Substorms
PresentSurname: Moore, T.E.
All Authors: T.E. Moore, M.C. Fok, B.L. Giles
Abstract : We briefly review concepts relating to the influence of ionospheric outflows on substorms, and vice versa, noting that causality has been difficult to establish, owing to deficiencies in our knowledge of magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling. Next, we review various efforts to observationally correlate these two phenomena, again showing that causality has remained elusive. These observations tend to focus our attention on the substorm-storm relationship, leading us to question many of our popular but unproven hypotheses. For example, the classic picture of a storm as a rapid barrage of substorms is being replaced by an understanding that a storm results from the cessation of substorm activity or its overshadowing by strong, deep magnetospheric convection. We take as a working hypothesis the proposal that relatively dense, heavy ion plasma outflows, produced by solar wind action on the dayside and substorm activity on the night-side, are involved in the change from substorm behavior to sustained deep convection. This may be accomplished by simple mass loading, or momentum loading of the neutral sheet, or more subtle effects such as influences on the distribution of reconnection rate in the plasma sheet by the character of the ionospheric inflows to the reconnecting region. We point out a number of issues are likely to be resolved using a new generation of global simulations that include ionospheric as well as solar wind plasmas in the system, and missions that allow study of both plasma characteristics and electromagnetic behavior in reconnecting regions of the tail.