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Quantifying the Impact of Dynamic Storm-Time Exospheric Density on Plasmaspheric Refilling
  • Lara Waldrop,
  • Gonzalo Cucho-Padin,
  • Naomi Maruyama
Lara Waldrop
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Gonzalo Cucho-Padin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Corresponding Author:gac3@illinois.edu

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Naomi Maruyama
University of Colorado Boulder
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Abstract

As soon as the outer plasmasphere gets eroded during geomagnetic storms, the greatly depleted plasmasphere is replenished by cold, dense plasma from the ionosphere. A strong correlation has been revealed between plasmaspheric refilling rates and ambient densities in the topside ionosphere and exosphere, particularly that of atomic hydrogen (H). Although measurements of H airglow emission at plasmaspheric altitudes exhibit storm-time response, temporally static distributions have typically been assumed in the H density in plasmasphere modeling. In this presentation, we evaluate the impact of a realistic distribution of the dynamic H density on the plasmaspheric refilling rate during the geomagnetic storm on March 17, 2013. The temporal and spatial evolution of the plasmaspheric density is calculated by using the Ionosphere-Plasmasphere Electrodynamics (IPE) model, which is driven by a global, 3-D, and time-dependent H density distribution reconstructed from the exospheric remote sensing measurements by NASA’s TWINS and TIMED missions. We quantify the spatial and temporal scales of the refilling rate and its correlation with H densities.