EPP

In Earth's high-latitude ionosphere, the poleward motion of east–west elongated auroral arcs has been attributed to standing hydromagnetic waves, especially when the auroral arcs appear quasi-periodically with a recurrence time of a few minutes. The validation of this scenario requires spacecraft observations of ultra-low-frequency hydromagnetic waves in the magnetosphere and simultaneous observations of poleward-moving auroral arcs near the spacecraft footprints. Here we present the first observational evidence from the multi-spacecraft THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) mission and the conjugated all-sky imager to support the scenario that standing hydromagnetic waves can generate the quasi-periodic appearance of poleward-moving auroral arcs. In this specific event, the observed waves were toroidal branches of the standing hydromagnetic waves, which were excited by a pulse in the solar wind dynamic pressure. Multi-spacecraft measurements from THEMIS also suggest higher wave frequencies at lower L shells (consistent with the distribution of magnetic field line eigenfrequencies), which indicates that the phase difference across latitudes would increase with time. As time proceeds, the enlarged phase difference corresponds to a lower propagation speed of the auroral arcs, which agrees very well with the ground-based optical data.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how low energy plasmaspheric electrons respond to ULF waves excited by interplanetary shocks impinging on magnetosphere. It is found that both energy and pitch angle dispersed plasmaspheric electrons with energy of a few eV to tens of eV can be generated simultaneously by the interplanetary shock. The subsequent period of successive dispersion signatures is around 40 s and is consistent with the ULF wave period (third harmonic). By tracing back the energy and pitch angle dispersion signatures, the position of the electron injection region is found to be off-equator at around –32° in the southern hemisphere. This can be explained as the result of injected electrons being accelerated by higher harmonic ULF waves (e.g. third harmonic) which carry a larger amplitude electric field off-equator. The dispersion signatures are due to the flux modulations (or accelerations) of " local” plasmaspheric electrons rather than electrons from the ionosphere. With the observed wave-borne large electric field excited by the interplanetary shock impact, the kinetic energy can increase to a maximum of 23 percent in one bouncing cycle for plasmaspheric electrons satisfying the drift-bounce resonance condition by taking account of both the corotating drift and bounce motion of the local plasmaspheric electron.