A Revised Look at Relativistic Electrons in the Inner Zone and Slot Region

Claudepierre, Seth

A Revised Look at Relativistic Electrons in the Inner Zone and Slot Region

Tuesday, 6 March 2018

Lakehouse (Hotel Quinta da Marinha)

Seth G Claudepierre¹, Thomas Paul O'Brien III², Joseph F. Fennell¹, J Bernard Blake¹, James H. Clemmons³, Mark Dixon Looper⁴, Joseph E Mazur⁵, James L Roeder¹, Drew L Turner⁶, Reeves Geoffrey⁷ and Harlan E. Spence⁸, (1)Aerospace Corporation, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (2)Aerospace Corp, Corpus Christi, TX, United States, (3)Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA, United States, (4)Aerospace Corporation El Segundo, El Segundo, CA, United States, (5)Aerospace Corporation Chantilly, Chantilly, VA, United States, (6)The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA, United States, (7)Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (8)University of New Hampshire, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, Durham, NH, United States

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Abstract:

We describe a new procedure for estimating and removing inner zone background contamination in the Van Allen Probes MagEIS electron measurements. This new procedure is based on the underlying assumption that the primary source of background contamination at L<3, energetic inner belt protons, is relatively stable. This allows us to build a model of the background contamination by binning the MagEIS histogram data from each detector in time and L, when the measurements are known to be background-dominated. While this new procedure is inherently limited in several aspects (e.g., temporal cadence, energy coverage, spatial coverage), it is demonstrated to be an improvement upon the routine background corrections that are part of the standard data processing. In particular, we are able to extract more foreground signal out of the relativistic electron data in the inner zone, which reveals that the 1 MeV injection reported in Claudepierre et al., [2017] is distributed more broadly in L than previously believed, and persists in the inner zone longer than previously believed. We discuss these new results and compare with more recent data that also shows 1 MeV electron injections into the inner zone (e.g., the September 2017 shock event).

Claudepierre, S. G., et al., (2017), The hidden dynamics of relativistic electrons (0.7-1.5 MeV) in the inner zone and slot region, J. Geophys. Res. Space Physics, 122, doi:10.1002/2016JA023719.