The effects of dynamic ionospheric outflow on the ring current

Abstract

The importance of ionospheric O+ on the development of the storm time ring current is recognized but not well understood. The addition of this outflow in global MHD models has the potential to change the magnetic field configuration, particle densities and temperatures, and the convection electric field. This makes including heavy ion outflow in ring current simulations difficult, as this addition cannot be easily decoupled from a host of other changes. This study attempts to overcome this problem by using three coupled models, PWOM, RIM, and BATS-R-US, to drive a ring current model, RAM-SCB. The differences in drivers when outflow is included and is not included are compared to see how outflow changes ring current input. It is found that including this outflow reduces the convection electric field, lowers the plasma sheet number density and temperature, and increases the complexity of the plasma sheet ion composition both temporally and spatially. These changes cause an overall reduction in ring current energy density. Further simulations that attempt to isolate these effects find that the most important change in terms of ring current development is the drop in convection electric field. Local time dependencies of O+ injections are found to be nontrivial as well. Capturing all of these effects requires a whole system, first-principles approach. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union.