HR: 0800h
AN: SM31B-1228    [Abstracts]
TI: Characteristic Time Scales of Sawtooth Phenomenon in the Magnetosphere
AU: * Gomez, T
EM: tenochg@astro.umd.edu
AF: University of Maryland, Department of Astronomy, College Park, MD 20742 United States
AU: Sharma, A
EM: ssh@umd.edu
AF: University of Maryland, Department of Astronomy, College Park, MD 20742 United States
AB: The sawtooth phenomenon in the magnetosphere reflect the coupling between the inner magnetosphere and magnetotail, and thus have important implications on storm-substorm relationship. In this study the data of sawtooth events from the LANL geosynchronous satellites during July 2000 - December 2001 (Skoug et al., 2002 Spring AGU Meeting) are used to obtain their characteristic features. The data set consists of 71 events for which the electron and proton fluxes in many energy channels are measured by the geosynchronous satellites. For the electrons there are 10 energy channels ranging from 50 keV to >1.5 MeV, and for the protons there are 12 channels with energies ranging from 50 keV to 50 MeV. The data for each channel in electron or proton energy are combined together by taking the peaks in each of them as the common reference point. The fluxes are then averaged over the events to get the mean shape of the sawtooth oscillations. The rise and decay times computed from these provide the characteristics time scales quantifying the sawtooth nature of the oscillations. For example, the rise time is found to be typically half of the decay time. These time scales for electrons and protons, and their variability are studied in order to characterize of the sawtooth oscillations quantitatively.
DE: 2720 Energetic particles, trapped
DE: 2730 Magnetosphere--inner
DE: 2740 Magnetospheric configuration and dynamics
DE: 2788 Storms and substorms
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting