HR: 08:20h
AN: SM21C-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Cluster and Ground-Based Observations of Flux Transfer Events During the 10,000 km Separation Season
AU: * Fear, R C
EM: r.fear@ion.le.ac.uk
AF: University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, United Kingdom
AU: Milan, S E
EM: steve.milan@ion.le.ac.uk
AF: University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, United Kingdom
AU: Fazakerley, A N
EM: anf@mssl.ucl.ac.uk
AF: Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London, Holmbury St. Mary, Dorking, Surrey, RH5 6NT, United Kingdom
AU: Lucek, E A
EM: e.lucek@imperial.ac.uk
AF: Imperial College London, Prince Consort Road, London, SW7 2BZ, United Kingdom
AB: Between 1920 and 1950~UT on 27th January 2006, the Cluster spacecraft straddled the dayside magnetopause slightly equatorward of the cusp in the post-noon sector. The spacecraft formed a tetrahedron with a scale length of 10,000~km. The lagged IMF was largely directed sunward, but with weak and approximately equal duskward and southward components. A series of flux transfer events (FTEs) were observed by differing subsets of the Cluster spacecraft, three of which were observed by all four spacecraft. Multi-spacecraft timing analysis indicates that these FTEs moved predominantly latitudinally, but their observation at all four spacecraft indicates that these three FTEs extend longitudinally for at least 10,000~km. Simultaneously, pulsed ionospheric flows (PIFs) were observed, although there is no clear one-to-one correlation between the PIFs and the FTEs. We present in situ observations, along with attempts to quantify the flux reconnected during this interval using ground-based observations.
DE: 2700 MAGNETOSPHERIC PHYSICS (6939)
DE: 2723 Magnetic reconnection (7526, 7835)
DE: 2724 Magnetopause and boundary layers
DE: 2784 Solar wind/magnetosphere interactions
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting