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An empirical model for the location and occurrence rate of near‐Earth magnetotail reconnection
Author(s) -
Genestreti K. J.,
Fuselier S. A.,
Goldstein J.,
Nagai T.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: space physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-9402
pISSN - 2169-9380
DOI - 10.1002/2013ja019125
Subject(s) - diffusion , physics , magnitude (astronomy) , magnetic reconnection , geodesy , plasma sheet , geophysics , substorm , current sheet , ephemeris , flow (mathematics) , statistical physics , computational physics , geology , magnetosphere , astrophysics , mechanics , satellite , magnetic field , magnetohydrodynamics , quantum mechanics , astronomy , thermodynamics
We introduce an empirical model for the location and rate of occurrence of magnetic reconnection in the near‐Earth magnetotail. The model is constructed using Geotail data, including the set of diffusion region and fast tailward flow events identified in Nagai et al. (2005). Events are arranged by their X GSM location. The event occurrence profile is normalized by the time spent by Geotail within a distance d of the modeled neutral sheet. To locate the neutral sheet, we use the empirical model of Fairfield (1980). We organize our data via a coordinate system that conforms to the Fairfield neutral sheet model. In this new coordinate system, we calculate the deviation of physical neutral sheet crossings from their Fairfield‐model‐predicted locations. We equate d to constant multiples of this standard deviation (0.5 R E , 2 R E , and 5 R E ). Using these values, we find that our deduced rate of occurrence of reconnection events has a magnitude consistent with those from similar calculations found in the existing literature. We then use our empirical model to analyze the predicted ephemeris for the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. We predict that during its upcoming near‐tail survey phase, MMS will observe between nine and four diffusion region events (nominal estimate of 7), and between 57 and 31 fast tailward flow events (nominal estimate of 47). Because of the restrictive nature of the criteria used to identify diffusion region events, we emphasize that the number of predicted events that we calculate represents a conservative estimate.