Using auroral streamers to remote sense radial transport in the nightside magnetosphere

Abstract

Using one year of ground-based Meridian Scanning Photometer (MSP) data, a survey of auroral streamers was carried out. Streamers are understood to be signatures of bursty bulk flows (BBFs) in the central plasma sheet (CPS) which are responsible for the majority of Earthward energy, plasma, and magnetic flux transport in the magnetosphere [Zesta et al., 2000; Angelopoulos et al., 1994]. The primary objective of this project was to study the large-scale behaviour and statistics of BBFs in a fundamentally new way, using streamers. Superposed epoch keograms were created and distinct trends were observed coinciding with the appearance of streamers in both the 486 and 558 nm MSP data. A distribution of streamer penetration depths was created to investigate how frequently BBFs reach the inner magnetosphere. Using the 1989 Tsyganenko magnetosphere model, these events were traced to the CPS to approximate their speed and trajectories.