SA23D-03:
Hemispheric Assymeries in Auroral Precipitation
Tuesday, 16 December 2014: 2:16 PM
Stephen B Mende, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States
Abstract:
It is widely accepted that the space weather related electrodynamic forcing of the geospace environment acts through the high geomagnetic latitude regions. At high latitudes inter-hemispheric asymmetries are largely due to the differences in solar illumination, the direction of the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field components and to a lesser extent, due to differences between the two hemispheric internal fields. So far most research regarding interhemispheric differences concentrated on learning about the basic magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling mechanisms. It has been well established that sunlit conditions affect the energy flux of auroral precipitation resulting from the reduction in the mean energy of the auroral electrons in the sunlit summer hemisphere. This can be explained by the partial shorting out of the particle accelerating fields by the sunlight induced conductivity. It has also been found that sunlit conditions reduce the particle fluxes and therefore the associated field aligned currents. Unless the precipitation-induced conductivities overwhelm the sunlit component of conductivity, this would imply that the magnetospheric current generator responds to the ionospheric load in a highly non-linear manner. Interhemispheric currents may also play an important role that has not been fully explored. Interhemispheric asymmetries in substorm morphology have been explored critically because conjugacy implies that substorms have a common source at equatorial latitudes. In some cases the lack of conjugacy of substorms could be explained by considering the magnitude and direction of the IMF.
