Ionospheric control of the magnetosphere: conductance

By A. Ridley, Tamas I. Gombosi, D. Dezeeuw. 2004

406 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. It is well known that the ionosphere plays a role in determining the global state of the magnetosphere. The ionosphere allows magnetospheric currents to close, thereby allowing magnetospheric convection to occur. The amount of current which can be carried through the ionosphere is mainly determined by the ionospheric conductivity. This paper starts to quantify the nonlinear relationship between the ionospheric conductivity and the global state of the magnetosphere. It is found that the steady-state magnetosphere acts neither as a current nor as a voltage generator; a uniform Hall conductance can influence the potential pattern at low latitudes, but not at high latitude; the EUV generated conductance forces the currents to close in the sunlight, while the potential is large on the nightside; the solar generated Hall conductances cause a large asymmetry between the dawn and dusk potential, which effects the pressure distribution in the magnetosphere; a uniform polar cap potential removes some of this asymmetry; the potential difference between solar minimum and maximum is ∼11%; and the auroral precipitation can be related to the local field-aligned current through an exponential function. Key words. Ionosphere (ionosphere-magnetosphere interactions; modelling and forecasting; polar ionosphere)

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c11f6753cf87b0efce8495f79e1083a2cabdd9c

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Citations in the corpus

Space Weather Modeling Framework: A new tool for the space science community (2005, neutral): “…conductance maps; the assimilative mapping of ionospheric electrodynamics [Richmond and Kamide, 1988]; and the height averaged electric potential solver, which uses the field-aligned currents to calculate particle precipitation and conductances [Ridley et al., 2004; Ridley and Liemohn, 2002].”
Adaptive numerical algorithms in space weather modeling (2012, methodology): “The RIM [54] code uses the ﬁeld-aligned currents to calculate particle precipitation and conductances based on empirical relationships, and then it solves for the electric potential on a 2D spherical grid.”
Kinetic simulations of ring current evolution during the Geospace Environment Modeling challenge events (2006, methodology): “They showed that both the Weimer [1996] model and a self-consistent potential model [Ridley et al., 2004] provide a good description of the storm-time development of the plasmasphere, with the self-consistent electric field model being the best choice.”
Coupling of a global MHD code and an inner magnetospheric model: Initial results (2004, background): “[50] The ionosphere-magnetosphere (I-M) coupling, on the other hand, is a highly nonlinear two-way interaction which strongly affects the large-scale behavior of both domains [Ridley et al., 2004].”
Climatological patterns of high-latitude convection in the Northern and Southern hemispheres: Dipole tilt dependencies and interhemispheric comparisons (2010, background): “In addition, the crescent‐shaped cells are weakened as tilt angle progresses from negative to positive, most likely due to vastly different solar produced conductivities under different tilt angles.”