Ionospheric signatures of plasmaspheric tails

By J. C. Foster, P. Erickson, Anthea J. Coster, Jerry Goldstein, F. J. Rich. 2002

300 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We make direct comparisons between GPS maps of total electron content (TEC) over the North American continent, Millstone Hill radar observations of storm enhanced density, and low and high‐altitude satellite measurements of the perturbation of the outer plasmasphere during the March 31, 2001 geomagnetic storm. We find that storm enhanced density (SED) and plumes of greatly‐elevated TEC are associated with the erosion of the outer plasmasphere by strong sub‐auroral polarization electric fields. The SED/TEC plumes identified at low altitude map closely onto the magnetospheric determination of the boundaries of the plasmapause and plasmaspheric tail determined by EUV imaging from the IMAGE spacecraft. Characteristics of the SED/TEC plumes/tails for the March 31, 2001 event are: TEC ∼ 100 TECu; F‐region sunward velocity ∼1000 m/s; sunward flux ∼5*1024 ions s−1; total transport to dayside magnetopause/merging region (3‐hr event) ∼5*1028 ions.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7926bfd22e476d29542db43f11225b5c6b45162d

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Citations in the corpus

Global dayside ionospheric uplift and enhancement associated with interplanetary electric fields (2004, unknown): “At this time we do not know how this GPS signature is related to Subauroral Polarization Streams (SAPS) [Foster and Vo, 2002; Foster et al., 2002].”
Automated GPS processing for global total electron content data (2006, background): “A large amount of science has already been accomplished using the small amount of existing TEC data ( Foster et al. 2002, 2004, 2005a, b; Nicolls et al. 2004; Coster et al. 2006).”
The Plasmasphere Boundary Layer (2004, background): “…surges of the hot ion and electron components of the plasma sheet (e.g. Anderson et al., 1991; 1993), fast westward flows within sub-auroral latitude belts are initiated in the pre-midnight sector (e.g. Galperin et al., 1973; Spiro et al., 1979; Anderson et al., 2001; Foster et al., 2002).”
Plasmaspheric Density Structures and Dynamics: Properties Observed by the CLUSTER and IMAGE Missions (2009, background): “Plasmaspheric plume signatures have also been detected in the ionosphere, in particular with TEC measurements (Foster et al. 2002).”
Identifying the plasmapause in IMAGE EUV data using IMAGE RPI in situ steep density gradients (2003, methodology): “[27] Our study assumes that the plasmapause is roughly field-aligned [e.g., Foster et al., 2002].”
Space Weather Effects in the Earth’s Radiation Belts (2018, methodology): “A geospace system perspective of SED has been provided with distributed ground-based Global Positioning System (GPS) observations of TEC (Foster et al. 2002) and with spacebased imagery of the outer plasmasphere by the IMAGE EUV instrument (Goldstein and Sandel 2005).”
Extreme Ultraviolet Imager Observations of the Structure and Dynamics of the Plasmasphere (2003, methodology): “For this work Foster et al. (2002) used maps of the vertical ionospheric TEC inferred from GPS measurements during the storm of 31 March 2001.”
Multiradar observations of the polar tongue of ionization (2005, unknown): “Combining ground and space-based thermal plasma imaging techniques, Foster et al. [2002] demonstrated that one such ionospheric SED plume mapped into the low-altitude signature of a plasmasphere drainage plume associated with the stormtime erosion of the PBL.”
A strong positive phase of ionospheric storms observed by the Millstone Hill incoherent scatter radar and global GPS network (2005, methodology): “Foster et al. [2002] have compared measurements of SED with the Millstone Hill radar, the global GPS receiver network, and the DMSP satellites.”
GPS observations of the ionospheric F2-layer behavior during the 20th November 2003 geomagnetic storm over South Korea (2008, background): “Although many studies of geomagnetic storms have been carried out in United states and Europe (e.g., Foster et al. 2002, 2004; Yin et al. 2004; Goncharenko et al. 2007), investigations on ionospheric behavior to storms in Asia are relatively few due to a lack of dense sets of GPS observations, etc”
A statistical look at plasmaspheric drainage plumes (2008, background): “There is also substantial interest in the ionospheric signatures of drainage plumes [Su et al., 2001c; Foster et al., 2002, 2007; Spasojevic et al., 2004].”