M-I Coupling: Study of Magnetospheric Dynamics with Ionospheric Outflows

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The effects of outflowing ionospheric ions on the dynamics of the magnetosphere is an inherently very difficult problem to study. A natural way of studying such phenomena is to utilize kinetic particle simulations. The difficulty in doing such simulations has been the large amounts of computer time required to generate physically reasonable results. New version of the EMPM (Electromagnetic Particle Model) code has been developed to make use of the capabilities of massively parallel computers such as the ORIGIN 2000 or the Cray T3E. This new code will provide a factor of two improvement in spatial resolution over the previous code and will provide better dynamics of the inner magnetosphere and ring current.Ionopsheric models of outflowing heavy ions will be used to incorporate the injection of these ions into the magnetosphere. The EMPM code will then be used to study the dynamics of magnetic storms as affected by the presence of heavy ions. In particular, the effect of changes in the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) will be investigated. This will be done using simplified time-varying IMFs to determine the effect of the varying IMF on the M-I coupling due to overflow of ionospheric ions.