This project will examine the mechanisms by which charged particles in Earth's magnetic field travel both out of and through the atmosphere. Identifying these mechanisms is important for understanding how the various layers of the near-Earth environment are coupled. Understanding the neutral and charged atmosphere has become of increasing interest for understanding the background in which space weather events play. Data from NSF supported facilities such as the Advanced Modular Incoherent Scatter Radar (AMISR) will be analyzed in conjunction with space craft data. This award will also fund two postdoctoral researchers.
Current particle precipitation theories assume that energetic particles in the magnetosphere precipitate into the atmosphere after undergoing pitch-angle scattering into the loss cone due to interactions with waves at or near the geomagnetic equator. However, the experimental verification of the effect of the multiple candidate waves on the particles' pitch-angle distributions has not been definitively established. This project brings together height-resolved measurements of ionization in the ionosphere, in situ measurements of pitch-angle scattering in the inner magnetosphere, and multidisciplinary expertise to achieve closure for all wave modes that may be involved in electron precipitation mechanisms. Instances of temporally coincident Van Allen Probes' measurements of particles and waves in the radiation belt (or ring current) and Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar (PFISR) measurements of particles precipitating into the ionosphere near the foot-point of the Van Allen Probes' flux tubes will be identified. The loss-cone distribution functions created by candidate waves for pitch-angle scattering using the quasi-linear diffusion equations will be calculated. Changes in the phase-space distribution of electrons that are produced by the electric and magnetic wave fields in the frequency range from a few Hz to several kHz will be quantified by applying UCLAs Full Diffusion Code to Van Allen Probes' particle and field measurements. Finally, a comparison of the ionization profiles produced in the atmosphere by loss cone distributions calculated from Van Allen Probes' data with the ionization profiles directly measured with PFISR.
