“…It is commonly agreed that the appearance of a ballooning perturbation (i.e., a bubble or a bubble-blob pair) in the near-Earth tail provokes its destabilization and under certain conditions may trigger substorm. Previously it was suggested that ballooning-type perturbations can appear in the near tail either due to earthward floating plasma bubbles, as initially proposed by Erickson and Wolf [1980] and observationally evidenced by Baumjohann et al [1989], Angelopoulos et al [1992], and others or in result of ballooning/interchange instability growth [e.g., Roux et al, 1991;Saito et al, 2008;Coroniti, 2010, 2011;Panov et al, 2012;Kozelova and Kozelov, 2013]. The present study points to one more possibility, namely, that ballooning perturbations can be transported to the near tail by propagating ballooning waves.…”