Geomagnetic Storms and EMIC waves: Van Allen Probe observations

Abstract:

EMIC waves are believed to play an important role in the dynamics of ring current ions and radiation belt electrons, especially during geomagnetic storms. But, in which phase of the storm do the EMIC waves occur more is still under debate. Ground and some low altitude satellite observations demonstrate that EMIC waves are observed more frequently during the recovery phase, rather than during the main phase. Halford et al. 2010 looked at the occurrences of EMIC waves during 119 storms occurring throughout the CRRES mission. They found that 49 of the 119 (41%) storms observed EMIC waves and the majority, 56.25%, of storm time EMIC waves occurring during the main phase, while 35.57% in the recovery phase. One shortcoming of the CRRES mission is that the apogee of it did not covered the dawn to noon sector during its life time. Therefore, some dayside EMIC waves caused by the compression of magnetosphere may not be included in Halford et al 2010, as they mentioned. The apogee of Van Allen Probes covered all the MLT sectors from their launch to April 2014. Utilizing the data from magnetometer instrument on board the Van Allen Probe A, Wang et al. 2015 studied the occurrence rate of H-band and He-band EMIC waves in different MLT sectors, and Yu et al 2015 reported the O-band EMIC wave observations. In this work, we analysis the occurrence of EMIC waves during storms. According to the criteria of storm in Halford et al. 2010, we find 76 storms in our interested period, 8 September 2012 to 30 April 2014, when the apogee of Van Allen Probe A covered all the MLT sectors. To identify the onset of geomagnetic storm more accurately, we corrected the Sym-H index referred to Zhao and Zong (2011), which is helpful to demonstrate the activity of ring current. 50 of the 76 storms (66%) observed 124 EMIC wave events, in which 80 (64.5%) EMIC wave events are found in the recovery phase, more than the EMIC wave events in the main phase (35, 28.2%). The remaining 9 (7.3%) EMIC wave events are found in the pre-onset phase, defined as that in Halford et al. 2010. This result is different from that of Halford et al. 2010. The reason may lie on the different orbit coverage of the two different satellites. The dominant storm type, CME or CIR, is also checked for the storms in the different periods, which may also lead to the differences between our research results and those of Halford et al. 2010.