The Many Facets of Reconnection at the Dayside Magnetopause
Tuesday, September 29, 2015: 8:40 AM
Paul Cassak1, Colin M Komar1,2, Christopher Doss1, Raymond Luis Fermo3, Frederick D Wilder4, Stefan Eriksson4 and James Frederick Drake5, (1)West Virginia University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Morgantown, WV, United States, (2)NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, United States, (4)Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, CO, United States, (5)University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States
Abstract:
Magnetic reconnection at the dayside magnetopause plays a crucial role in solar wind-magnetospheric coupling, as it drives magnetospheric convection and is necessary for magnetic energy storage in the magnetotail. Many fundamental questions about dayside reconnection remain insufficiently answered quantitatively and even qualitatively, such as the location and local efficiency of reconnection for arbitrary solar wind conditions. The situation is complicated compared to simple two-dimensional models because the dayside naturally is usually asymmetric, has flow shear due to the solar wind (especially when the interplanetary magnetic field has a northward component), and is three-dimensional due to the shape of the magnetosphere. This talk will summarize recent theoretical, numerical, and observational work on a number of aspects of dayside reconnection, including the properties of asymmetric reconnection with a flow shear, the location of reconnection on the dayside, and the local efficiency and properties of reconnection at the dayside. Theoretical predictions are compared to two-dimensional local numerical simulations of reconnection and naturally occurring reconnection in self-consistent three-dimensional global magnetospheric magnetohydrodynamic simulations. Departures from previous understanding on all three topics are found and will be discussed. Results are analyzed in context of observations of reconnection at the polar cusps.
