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Title: The global context of the 14 November 2012 storm event

Journal Article · · Journal of Geophysical Research. Space Physics
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/2014JA020826· OSTI ID:1200614
 [1];  [2];  [2];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [2];  [5];  [6]; ORCiD logo [7];  [8];  [9];  [6]
  1. NASA Goddard Lab. Space Flight Center; Greenbelt, MD (United States); Univ. of Maryland at Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD (United States)
  2. NASA Goddard Lab. Space Flight Center; Greenbelt, MD (United States)
  3. Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States)
  4. Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Daejeon (South Korea)
  5. Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helskinki (Finland)
  6. NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, Boulder, CO (United States)
  7. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  8. Johns Hopkins Univ., Laurel, MD (United States)
  9. Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (United States)

From 2 to 5 UT on 14 November 2012, the Van Allen Probes observed repeated particle flux dropouts during the main phase of a geomagnetic storm as the satellites traversed the post-midnight to dawnside inner magnetosphere. Each flux dropout corresponded to an abrupt change in the magnetic topology, i.e., from a more dipolar configuration to a configuration with magnetic field lines stretched in the dawn-dusk direction. Geosynchronous GOES spacecraft located in the dusk and near-midnight sectors and the LANL constellation with wide local time coverage also observed repeated flux dropouts and stretched field lines with similar occurrence patterns to those of the Van Allen Probe events. THEMIS recorded multiple transient abrupt expansions of the evening-side magnetopause ~20–30 min prior to the sequential Van Allen Probes observations. Ground-based magnetograms and all sky images demonstrate repeatable features in conjunction with the dropouts. We combine the various in-situ and ground-based measurements to define and understand the global spatiotemporal features associated with the dropouts observed by the Van Allen Probes. We discuss various proposed hypotheses for the mechanism that plausibly caused this storm-time dropout event as well as formulate a new hypothesis that explains the combined in-situ and ground-based observations: the earthward motion of magnetic flux ropes containing lobe plasmas that form along an extended magnetotail reconnection line in the near-Earth plasma sheet.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396
OSTI ID:
1200614
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-15-20029
Journal Information:
Journal of Geophysical Research. Space Physics, Vol. 120, Issue 3; ISSN 2169-9380
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 8 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (1)

Magnetosphere dynamics during the 14 November 2012 storm inferred from TWINS, AMPERE, Van Allen Probes, and BATS-R-US–CRCM journal January 2018

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