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Abstract:
During the second half of 2019, the Earth’s magnetosphere was impacted by a sequence of Corotating Interaction Regions (CIRs) during four consecutive solar rotations. Based on the solar wind properties, the CIRs can be divided in four groups, with the 3rd group, which arrived on August-September 2019, resulting in significant multi-MeV electron enhancements, up to ultra-relativistic energies of 9.9 MeV.
Each CIR group has a different effect on the outer radiation belt electron populations; we investigate them by exploiting combined measurements from the Van Allen Probes, THEMIS, and Arase satellites. We produce Phase Space Density (PSD) radial profiles and inspect their dependence on the values of the first and second adiabatic invariants (μ,K), ranging from seed to ultra-relativistic electrons and from near-equatorial to off equatorial mirroring populations, respectively.
Focusing on the 3rd CIR group, and in order to assess the relative contribution of radial diffusion and gyro-resonant acceleration, we perform numerical simulations of the radiation belt environment, combining several relevant models: EMERALD (NKUA), GEO model (NKUA), Salammbô (ONERA), VLF model (IAP), Plasmaspheric model (BIRA-IASB), FARWEST (ONERA). We further compare the temporal evolution of the simulated electron PSD with the above observations.
This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870437 for the SafeSpace project.
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Additional co-authors:
Viviane Pierrard (5), Edith Botek (5), Benjamin Grison (3), Ivana Kolmasova (3), David Pisa (3), Takefumi Mitani (10), Ayako Matsuoka (11), Iku Shinohara (10), Takeshi Takashima (10), Tomoaki Hori (6)
(10) ISAS, JAXA, Japan, (11) Kyoto University, Japan
