GEM: Characterizing the Global Plasma Pressure During Storms and It's Response to Substorms

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project will make use of the energetic neutral atom (ENA) images from the NASA IMAGE spacecraft to investigate the global plasma pressure distributions (both H+ and O+) in the magnetosphere during geomagnetic storms. Additional data from the AMPTE/CCE spacecraft will be used to validate the pressure and specify the pressure anisotropies. Other data sources that will be utilized include the Cluster spacecraft, GOES magnetometer data, LANL, Geotail and Polar particle data. The project will utilize the data to investigate how storm-time substorm injections effect the storm-time ring current. A magnetic index equivalent to the commonly used Dst index will be computed from the ENA data and this will be used to determine the importance of substorm injections to the energy balance in the ring current during magnetic storms. The ion pressure distributions computed for the different storms studied will be made available to the general space physics community and can be used to compare observations with model results.