HR: 11:20h
AN: SM12B-05    [Abstracts]
TI: MHD Simulations of Turbulence in the Plasma Sheet
AU: * El-Alaoui, M
EM: mostafa@igpp.ucla.edu
AF: Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California at Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567,
AU: Ashour-Abdalla, M
AF: Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California at Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567,
AU: Ashour-Abdalla, M
AF: 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California at Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095,
AU: Goldstein, M L
AF: Laboratory for Geospace Science, Code 673 Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771,
AU: Walker, R J
AF: Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California at Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567,
AU: Richard, R L
AF: Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California at Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567,
AB: In this study we use our global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation code driven by an idealized time series of solar wind parameters to investigate the global aspects of turbulence in the plasma sheet. As a first step we will consider the effects of turbulence during southward Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) conditions. During southward IMF, localized and large scale reconnection drives flows and vorticity in the tail at different scales. We impose a steady southward IMF at the upstream simulation boundary. This eliminates the solar wind as a source of turbulence in the model and to investigate the relationship between reconnection-driven convection, waves on the magnetopause boundary and turbulence in the magnetotail. For this study we used an enhanced resolution code with a minimum grid spacing of the order of 0.12 RE. We also saved the results every second at an array of points near the equatorial plane to obtain high resolution time series of the simulation results and to calculate power spectra. The simulation shows that there is considerable wave activity along the magnetopause in addition to the vorticity in the plasma sheet. We will quantify the turbulence in the plasma sheet by calculating the power spectral density and probability distributions.
DE: 2740 Magnetospheric configuration and dynamics
DE: 2744 Magnetotail
DE: 2753 Numerical modeling
DE: 2764 Plasma sheet
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting