scholarly journals Comparison of Van Allen Probes radiation belt proton data with test particle simulation for the 17 March 2015 storm

2016 ◽  
Vol 121 (11) ◽  
pp. 11,035-11,041 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. A. Engel ◽  
B. T. Kress ◽  
M. K. Hudson ◽  
R. S. Selesnick
2017 ◽  
Vol 122 (8) ◽  
pp. 8327-8339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao-Chen Shen ◽  
Mary K. Hudson ◽  
Allison N. Jaynes ◽  
Quanqi Shi ◽  
Anmin Tian ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Xuanye Ma ◽  
Peter Delamere ◽  
Katariina Nykyri ◽  
Brandon Burkholder ◽  
Stefan Eriksson ◽  
...  

Over three decades of in-situ observations illustrate that the Kelvin–Helmholtz (KH) instability driven by the sheared flow between the magnetosheath and magnetospheric plasma often occurs on the magnetopause of Earth and other planets under various interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) conditions. It has been well demonstrated that the KH instability plays an important role for energy, momentum, and mass transport during the solar-wind-magnetosphere coupling process. Particularly, the KH instability is an important mechanism to trigger secondary small scale (i.e., often kinetic-scale) physical processes, such as magnetic reconnection, kinetic Alfvén waves, ion-acoustic waves, and turbulence, providing the bridge for the coupling of cross scale physical processes. From the simulation perspective, to fully investigate the role of the KH instability on the cross-scale process requires a numerical modeling that can describe the physical scales from a few Earth radii to a few ion (even electron) inertial lengths in three dimensions, which is often computationally expensive. Thus, different simulation methods are required to explore physical processes on different length scales, and cross validate the physical processes which occur on the overlapping length scales. Test particle simulation provides such a bridge to connect the MHD scale to the kinetic scale. This study applies different test particle approaches and cross validates the different results against one another to investigate the behavior of different ion species (i.e., H+ and O+), which include particle distributions, mixing and heating. It shows that the ion transport rate is about 1025 particles/s, and mixing diffusion coefficient is about 1010 m2 s−1 regardless of the ion species. Magnetic field lines change their topology via the magnetic reconnection process driven by the three-dimensional KH instability, connecting two flux tubes with different temperature, which eventually causes anisotropic temperature in the newly reconnected flux.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dedong Wang ◽  
Yuri Shprits ◽  
Alexander Drozdov ◽  
Nikita Aseev ◽  
Irina Zhelavskaya ◽  
...  

<p>Using the three-dimensional Versatile Electron Radiation Belt (VERB-3D) code, we perform simulations to investigate the dynamic evolution of relativistic electrons in the Earth’s outer radiation belt. In our simulations, we use data from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) to set up the outer boundary condition, which is the only data input for simulations. The magnetopause shadowing effect is included by using last closed drift shell (LCDS), and it is shown to significantly contribute to the dropouts of relativistic electrons at high $L^*$. We validate our simulation results against measurements from Van Allen Probes. In long-term simulations, we test how the latitudinal dependence of chorus waves can affect the dynamics of the radiation belt electrons. Results show that the variability of chorus waves at high latitudes is critical for modeling of megaelectron volt (MeV) electrons. We show that, depending on the latitudinal distribution of chorus waves under different geomagnetic conditions, they cannot only produce a net acceleration but also a net loss of MeV electrons. Decrease in high‐latitude chorus waves can tip the balance between acceleration and loss toward acceleration, or alternatively, the increase in high‐latitude waves can result in a net loss of MeV electrons. Variations in high‐latitude chorus may account for some of the variability of MeV electrons. </p><p>Our simulation results for the NSF GEM Challenge Events show that the position of the plasmapause plays a significant role in the dynamic evolution of relativistic electrons. We also perform simulations for the COSPAR International Space Weather Action Team (ISWAT) Challenge for the year 2017. The COSPAR ISWAT is a global hub for collaborations addressing challenges across the field of space weather. One of the objectives of the G3-04 team “Internal Charging Effects and the Relevant Space Environment” is model performance assessment and improvement. One of the expected outputs is a more systematic assessment of model performance under different conditions. The G3-04 team proposed performing benchmarking challenge runs. We ‘fly’ a virtual satellite through our simulation results and compare the simulated differential electron fluxes at 0.9 MeV and 57.27 degrees local pitch-angle with the fluxes measured by the Van Allen Probes. In general, our simulation results show good agreement with observations. We calculated several different matrices to validate our simulation results against satellite observations.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (8) ◽  
pp. 6524-6540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megha Pandya ◽  
Veenadhari Bhaskara ◽  
Yusuke Ebihara ◽  
Shrikanth G. Kanekal ◽  
Daniel N. Baker

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