SA31E-2380
Mass Transport and Dynamics at Subauroral Latitudes During The March 17, 2013 Storm

Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Philip John Erickson1, John C Foster1, Anthea J Coster1, John R Wygant2 and John W Bonnell3, (1)MIT Haystack Observatory, Westford, MA, United States, (2)University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, United States, (3)University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States
Abstract:
During geomagnetic storm periods, plasmasphere erosion carries cold dense plasma of ionospheric origin in a storm-enhanced density plume, extending from dusk toward and through the noontime cusp and dayside magnetopause and back across polar latitudes in a polar tongue of ionization. The March 17, 2013 large storm provided an excellent opportunity to observe these mass transfer processes using a number of ground and in-situ sensors.

We examine dusk sector (20 MLT) plasmasphere erosion during the 17 March 2013 storm (Dst ~ 130 nT) using simultaneous, magnetically aligned direct sunward ion flux observations at high altitude by Van Allen Probes RBSP-A (at ~3.0 Re) and at topside ionospheric heights (~840 km) by DMSP F-18, along with direct F region ionospheric observations using the subauroral Millstone Hill incoherent scatter radar system. Plasma erosion occurs at both high and low altitudes where the subauroral polarization stream flow overlaps the outer plasmasphere. At ~20 UT, RBSP-A observed ~1.2E12 m-2 s-1 erosion flux, while DMSP F-18 observed ~2E13 m-2 s-1 sunward flux. We find close similarities at high and low altitudes between the erosion plume in both invariant latitude spatial extent and plasma characteristics.

Other incoherent scatter radar facilities at Poker Flat, along with both the mainland Europe and Svalbard EISCAT radars, also have observations available during this period. We use these combined, multi-scale data sets in comparison to model predictions of SAPS, e.g. BATSRUS/RAM, OpenGGCM-RM. We will highlight successes and areas where progress is needed in the quantitative understanding of cold ionospheric origin mass flow through the geospace system and its direct impact on energy coupling to the solar wind.

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