Modeling ionospheric electron precipitation due to wave particle scattering in the magnetosphere and the feedback effect on the magnetospheric dynamics

Abstract:

Electron precipitation down to the atmosphere caused by wave-particle scattering in the magnetosphere contribute significantly to the enhancement of auroral ionospheric conductivity. Global MHD models that are incapable of capturing kinetic physics in the inner magnetosphere usually adopt MHD parameters to specify the precipitation flux to estimate auroral conductivity, hence losing self-consistency in the global circulation of the magnetosphere-ionosphere system. In this study we improve the coupling structure in global models by connecting the physics-based (wave-particle scattering) electron precipitation with the ionospheric electrodynamics and investigate the feedback effect on the magnetospheric dynamics. We use BATS-R-US coupled with a kinetic ring current model RAM-SCB that solves pitch angle dependent particle distributions to study the global circulation dynamics during the Jan 25-26, 2013 storm event. Following tail injections, we found enhanced precipitation number and energy fluxes of tens of keV electrons being scattered into loss cone due to interactions with enhanced chorus and hiss waves in the magnetosphere. This results in a more profound auroral conductance and larger electric field imposing on the plasma transport in the magnetosphere. We also compared our results with previous methods in specifying the auroral conductance, such as empirical relation used in Ridley et al. (2004). It is found that our physics-based method develops a larger convection electric field in the near-Earth region and therefore leads to a more intense ring current.