Publication Date:
2013-10-06
Description:
[1] Traveling convection vortices (TCVs), which appear in ground magnetometer records at near-cusp latitudes as solitary ~5 mHz pulses, are a signature of dynamical processes in the ion foreshock upstream of the Earth's bow shock that can stimulate transient compressions of the dayside magnetosphere. These compressions can also increase the growth rate of electromagnetic ion cyclotron (EMIC) waves, which appear in ground records at these same latitudes as bursts of Pc1 pulsations. In this study we have identified TCVs and simultaneous Pc1 burst events occurring from 2008 through the first 7 months of 2010 in two regions, Eastern Arctic Canada and Svalbard, using a combination of fluxgate magnetometers (the MACCS and IMAGE arrays) and search coil magnetometers in each region. By looking for the presence of TCVs and Pc1 bursts in two different sequences (identifying TCVs first in Eastern Canada, and then looking for simultaneous Pc1 bursts, and identifying Pc1 bursts first in Svalbard, and then looking for simultaneous TCVs), we have found that the distribution of Pc1 bursts was more tightly clustered near local noon than that of TCV events, that neither TCVs nor Pc1 bursts were always associated with the other, and even when they occurred simultaneously their amplitudes showed little correlation. Magnetometer data from GOES-12 were also used to characterize the strength of the magnetic compressions at geosynchronous orbit near the magnetic equator. Compressions 〉 2 nT at GOES-12 occurred during 57% of the Canadian TCV events, but during ~85% of the simultaneous TCV / Pc1 burst events. There was again little evident correlation between TCV and GOES-12 compression amplitudes. We have also documented unusually low EMIC wave activity during this deep solar minimum interval, and we attribute the low occurrence percentage of combined events in this study (much lower than that found in two earlier studies using data from this same region) to this minimum.
Print ISSN:
0148-0227
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics
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