Paper#: 67
Poster #:
Session Name: Workshop 5A: Tail Processes
Room: West Ballroom
Day: Wednesday
Time: 11:40-Noon
Abstract Title: The Relationship between Storms, Substorms and SMCs
PresentSurname: Henderson, M.G.
All Authors: M.G. Henderson
Abstract : It is widely believed that substorms, SMCs (Steady Magnetospheric Convection intervals), and storms are all very distinct magnetospheric phenomena and that each is associated with ``fundamentally different physical processes''. Contrary to this view, we argue that these phenomena display remarkably similar characteristics and that there is in fact very good evidence to indicate that they are much more closely related to one another than is commonly recognized. We hypothesize that an SMC can be viewed as a long-duration steadily-driven substorm recovery phase and that a storm can be viewed as an SMC with the addition of recurrent ``embedded'' (in both a spatial and temporal sense) substorm onsets (and expansion phases). From this point of view, all three types of geomagnetic disturbances can be viewed in terms of a single unified phenomenological framework.