A statistical and event study of magnetotail dipolarization fronts

By D. Schmid, M. Volwerk, R. Nakamura, Wolfgang Baumjohann, M. Heyn. Annals of Geophysics, 2011

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. A study of dipolarization fronts of the Earth's magnetotail has been performed using seven years (2001–2007) of Cluster data. Events both with and without high-speed earthward flows are included. A superposed epoch analysis of the data shows that the dipolarization is preceeded by a decrease of Bz before the increase. The duration of the dipolarization tends to be decreasing with increasing velocity of the plasma flows. The thickness of the dipolarization front is on average 1.8 plasma inertial lengths, independent of the plasma velocity. We find that the events fall into two categories: Earthward and tailward moving dipolarizations. The dipolarization fronts can be assumed to be tangential discontinuities and the currents on the front have mainly a perpendicular component.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c19f0db1a1e68a3ce0156ae55821499638368d1f

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Runov
2. V. Angelopoulos
3. Xuzhi Zhou
4. Jiang Liu
5. Y. Khotyaintsev
6. M. Sitnov
7. A. Retinò
8. Andris Vaivads

In Molecular Biology

1. A. Runov
2. V. Angelopoulos
3. Xuzhi Zhou
4. Jiang Liu
5. Mats André
6. Andris Vaivads
7. Y. Khotyaintsev
8. M. Sitnov

Citations in the corpus

• Electric structure of dipolarization front at sub‐proton scale (2012, methodology): “…location of a spacecraft relative to the DF [e.g., Zhou et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2011] or cannot resolve the smallscale structure of DF [e.g., Schmid et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2011], we re-compute j and r ⋅ Pe using two different techniques: single-spacecraft and multi-spacecraft technique…”
• Dipolarization fronts as a consequence of transient reconnection: In situ evidence (2013, methodology): “We identify these two jumps as DFs as they satisfy the following criteria [see Runov et al., 2009; Schmid et al., 2011; Fu et al., 2012b]: (1) BzGSM was the dominant component of magnetic field; (2) BzGSM increased/decreased more than 4 nT during several seconds, and simultaneously, the inclination…”
• On the current sheets surrounding dipolarizing flux bundles in the magnetotail: The case for wedgelets (2013, methodology): “This is consistent with previous results frommultipoint observations [Schmid et al., 2011].”
• Occurrence rate of earthward‐propagating dipolarization fronts (2012, methodology): “[6] Similar as previous studies [e.g., Schmid et al., 2011], we consider only the DFs in the region 10 > XGSM > 20 RE, 12 YGSM 12 RE and 5 ZGSM 5 RE.”