HR: 11:20h
AN: SM12A-04 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Heavy Ionospheric Ion Effects on Reconnection in the Magnetotail
AU: * Winglee, R M
EM: winglee@ess.washington.edu
AF: Univ. of Washington, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Seattle, WA 98195-1310 United States
AB: Heavy ionospheric ions such as $O^+$ can produce significant mass loading to the magnetotail and because of their gyro-radius can be substantially different from ionospheric or solar wind protons, the heavy ions can modify both the timing and structure of the magnetotail. Multi-fluid simulations are used to examine the changing structure of the tail under the influence of such heavy ionospheric ions. It is shown that for isolated substorms, the arrival of $O^+$ tends to be late relative to the onset of reconnection and therefore is only a minor player substorm initiation. However, if there are repeated north/south turnings of the IMF even on an hourly basis, the magnetosphere becomes loaded with heavy ions and the reconnection tail dynamics becomes substantially modified. These same IMF turning are shown to produce modifications of the plasma profile to the plasmaspheric/plasma sheet boundary.
DE: 2431 Ionosphere/magnetosphere interactions (2736)
DE: 2463 Plasma convection
DE: 2736 Magnetosphere/ionosphere interactions
DE: 2753 Numerical modeling
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting