SM41E-2529
RBSPICE Measurements of heavy Ion loss during the 2015 March storm
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
A. Rualdo Soto-chavez1, Louis J Lanzerotti1, Andrew J Gerrard2, Hyomin Kim2, Jacob Bortnik3, Ross Joseph Cohen1 and Jerry Wayne Manweiler4, (1)New Jersey Institute of Technology, Edison, NJ, United States, (2)New Jersey Institute of Technology, Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, Edison, NJ, United States, (3)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (4)Fundamental Technologies, LLC, Lawrence, KS, United States
Abstract:
We present particle flux and pitch angle data from the Van Allen Probes-A RBSPICE instrument during the March 17, 2015, geomagnetic storm that shows rapid loss of heavy ions following the storm onset. The ion loss is found to be strongly energy dependent where only ions with energies measured above ~100 keV have a significant drop in intensity. At these energies the ion dynamics are principally controlled by variations of the geomagnetic field which, during magnetic substorms, exhibits large scale variations on timescales from minutes to hours (or even days). Here we show that ~ 19:00 UTC on March 17 the geomagnetic field was compressed from 200 to 250 nT on a time scale of about an hour. This compression was capture by RBSPICE-A at spacecraft apogee [GSM coordinates (x=-4.98, y=3.00, z=-0.73)]. We demonstrate the relationship between this large geomagnetic field compression and the drop-outs of the heavy ions.
