The ionospheric source of magnetospheric plasma is not a black box input for global models

Abstract

Including ionospheric outflow in global magnetohydrodynamic models of near‐Earth outer space has become an important step toward understanding the role of this plasma source in the magnetosphere. Of the existing approaches, however, few tie the outflowing particle fluxes to magnetospheric conditions in a self‐consistent manner. Doing so opens the magnetosphere‐ionosphere system to nonlinear mass‐energy feedback loops, profoundly changing the behavior of the magnetosphere‐ionosphere system. Based on these new results, it is time for the community eschew treating ionospheric outflow as a simple black box source of magnetospheric plasma.

SWMF Global Magnetosphere Simulations of January 2005: Geomagnetic Indices and Cross‐Polar Cap Potential

“…CPCP has been shown to decrease as heavy ion outflow from the ionosphere increases (Welling & Zaharia, 2012;Winglee et al, 2002), so the fact that the models overpredict CPCP could be an indication that the model is underpredicting such outflow. This could be addressed through tuning of the inner boundary condition parameters, but such tuning is complicated by the fact that the outflow is itself dependent on CPCP (Winglee, 2000;Welling & Liemohn, 2014) and is likely to affect other aspects of the model such as tail dynamics, ring current, and the SYM-H values that are predicted (Kronberg et al, 2014;Welling & Liemohn, 2016). First-principles based models of ionospheric outflow provide an alternative, but at present they are too computationally expensive for long-period runs such as those described in the present work.…”

Effect of stellar wind induced magnetic fields on planetary obstacles of non-magnetized hot Jupiters

“…There are many physical processes, thermal and nonthermal, which are responsible for the escape of heavy ions and neutral particles and the importance of accounting for non-thermal escape processes for the solar system planets, and Earth in particular, has been shown for example by Welling & Liemohn (2016). However, the ion escape caused by the interaction with the stellar wind (Kislyakova et al 2013(Kislyakova et al , 2014aErkaev et al 2016) and the loss of photochemically produced suprathermal hydrogen atoms (Shematovich 2010) from a non-or weakly magnetized HD 209458b-like hot Jupiter are about an order of magnitude smaller than the thermal escape caused by the absorption of the highenergy stellar flux.…”

Dynamical Properties of Peak and Time‐Integrated Geomagnetic Events Inferred From Sample Entropy

“…Second, a decrease of marks a surge of organization/complexity in the ring current dynamics. It is probably due to the organization of the enhanced ring current itself, as well as to the partial feedback from various loss or mitigation mechanisms that start operating within the inner magnetosphere‐ionosphere system, hindering further ring current enhancements (Daglis et al, ; Ganushkina et al, ; Khazanov et al, ; Kozyra & Liemohn, ; O'Brien & McPherron, ; Siscoe et al, ; Welling & Liemohn, ). The fast increase of organization/complexity in the time series during storms should similarly correspond to a global structuring of field‐aligned currents flowing near the equatorial inner boundary of the convection region, over the course of successive substorm expansions and through the mediation of different loss and feedback mechanisms driven by wave‐induced particle precipitation and the resulting strong variations in ionospheric conductivity (Khazanov et al, ; Liou et al, ; Lysak, ; Ridley et al, ; Zhang & Paxton, ).…”

“…As the corresponding injections of currents, fields, and energetic particles flow toward the Earth through various channels, they can merge, and their individual effects may blend into more regular structures, averaging out to a much less stochastic dynamics that only retains the initial impact of the solar wind on the magnetosphere. The physical processes occurring from the inner auroral boundary down to subauroral regions may also provide sufficient feedbacks (Daglis et al, ; Khazanov et al, ; Liou et al, ; Lysak, ; Welling & Liemohn, ) to ensure a tighter dynamical organization in this zone, thereby reducing the amplitude of random fluctuations. As a result, the stochastic component arising from the preceding (in space and time) local processes can become minor near the inner edge of the auroral zone (in measurements) as well as further inward in ring current dynamics (in measurements), as compared with a regular, non‐stochastic component better correlated with solar wind driving ( ).…”

“…This stochastic component apparently gets filtered out at lower latitudes, near the inner boundary of the auroral zone, in such a way that only the non-stochastic component can affect currents and fields in subauroral regions. Such a stochastic component may arise from stochastic processes taking place at high auroral latitudes near the foot of geomagnetic field lines, such as ionospheric conductivity variations and ion outflows, that can strongly disturb both the field-aligned currents measured on the Earth and the development of susbtorms and injections in the tail (Khazanov et al, 2019;Welling & Liemohn, 2016). It could also be due to stochastic phenomena occurring in the magnetotail, such as reconnection processes and wave-particle interactions that perturb field-aligned currents inside the auroral oval (Borovsky et al, 1993;Daglis et al, 1999;Hesse et al, 2014;Khazanov et al, 2019;Liou et al, 2001;Liu et al, 2013;Lysak, 1990;Sharma et al, 2008).…”