“…[17] The RCM has successfully been used to explicate major magnetospheric phenomena such as the development of region-2 Birkeland currents which shield the magnetosphere [e.g., Jaggi and Wolf, 1973;Harel et al, 1981b], the buildup and evolution of the storm-time ring current [e.g., Wolf et al, 1982;Spiro and Wolf, 1984;Sazykin et al, 2002;Fok et al, 2003;Garner, 2003], formation and evolution of the plasmasphere and plasmapause [e.g., Spiro et al, 1981;Wolf et al, 1986], the penetration of convection electric fields to low ionospheric latitudes [e.g., Spiro et al, 1988;Fejer et al, 1990;Sazykin, 2000], the Harang discontinuity [Erickson et al, 1991], and coupling to the thermosphere [e.g., Forbes and Harel, 1989;Wolf et al, 1986].…”