Cross-tail velocity component in the plasma sheet fast flows

Structured Currents Associated with Tail Bursty Flows During Turbulent Plasma Sheet Conditions

Localized fast flow disturbance observed in the plasma sheet

An isolated plasma sheet flow burst took place at 22:02 UT, 1 September 2002, when the Cluster footpoint was located within the area covered by the Magnetometers-Ionospheric Radars-All-sky Cameras Large Experiment (MIRACLE). The event was associated with a clear but weak ionospheric disturbance and took place during a steady southward IMF interval, about 1 h preceding a major substorm onset. Mu...

THEMIS two‐point measurements of the cross‐tail current density: A thick bifurcated current sheet in the near‐Earth plasma sheet

The basic properties of the near-Earth current sheet from 8 RE to 12 RE were determined based on Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) observations from 2007 to 2013. Ampere's law was used to estimate the current density when the locations of two spacecraft were suitable for the calculation. A total of 3838 current density observations were obtained to stu...

Some properties of Alfvén waves: Observations in the tail lobes and the plasma sheet boundary layer

[1] We report properties of substorm-related, globally excited Alfvén waves on a temporal scale of 6 to 300 s (3.3 to 167 mHz) at geocentric distances between 5 and 6 RE. The waves were observed in the tail lobes and the plasma sheet boundary layer (PSBL) by the Polar satellite. In each region we made the following observations: (1) The tail lobe Alfvén waves started at substorm onset as determ...

Ion heat flux and energy transport near the magnetotail neutral sheet

[1] Ten-year averages of energy transport rates near the neutral sheet showed that the enthalpy flux density or thermal energy term QT = (5/2)PV was the largest, where P is the isotropic pressure and V is the bulk flow velocity. The ion heat flux, qi, was the next largest term. Sorting data using a magnetic flux transport parameter showed that qi could become dominant during periods of slow flo...