Coupling the Rice Convection Model‐Equilibrium to the Lyon‐Fedder‐Mobarry Global Magnetohydrodynamic Model

Abstract

The pursuit of realistic simulation of the physics of plasma transport, ring current formation and storm‐triggered Earth magnetic and electric field is an ongoing challenge in magnetospheric physics. To this end, we have implemented a coupling of the Lyon‐Fedder‐Mobarry (LFM) global magnetohydrodynamic model with the Rice convection model‐equilibrium (RCM‐E) of the inner‐magnetosphere and plasma sheet. This one‐way coupling scheme allows continuous update of the RCM‐E boundary conditions from the plasma moments calculated by the LFM while preserving entropy conservation. This results in a model that has the high‐resolution self‐consistent description of the inner magnetosphere and includes the effects of time‐dependent outer‐magnetospheric electromagnetic fields and plasma configurations. In addition, driving the RCM‐E in this way resolves the issue of having a plasma‐β‐constrained region in the coupled model of LFM‐RCM and expands the RCM‐E simulation region farther out into plasma sheet where the storm‐time plasma transportation takes place. In the ionosphere, the RCM‐E replaces the ionospheric electric field model of LFM with the one used by the RCM. The electric potential produced, along with the realistic ionospheric precipitation patterns shows strong consistency with the transportation patterns in the plasma sheet featured with well‐resolved bubbles and bursty bulk flows. Results from the simulations of an idealized event will be presented and discussed.

The Relation Among the Ring Current, Subauroral Polarization Stream, and the Geospace Plume: MAGE Simulation of the 31 March 2001 Super Storm

“…The use of ad‐hoc or empirical SAPS electric field instead of self‐consistent, physics‐based SAPS modeling prevents an investigation of the magnetosphere‐ionospheric coupling processes involved, where the coupled processes of the ring current buildup, the Region‐2 current generation and the electron precipitation could play important roles in the generation of SAPS (Lin et al., 2021, 2022) and the plume dynamics. SAMI3‐RCM simulation (Huba & Sazykin, 2014; Huba et al., 2017) had the advantage of a common electromagnetic field driving both ionospheric and magnetospheric plumes in the closed‐field‐line region, but it lacked a physics‐based representation of high‐latitude dynamics coupled to the rest of the simulation domain and an outer‐magnetosphere model that can provide the ring current model with storm‐time plasma injections at its boundary (Bao et al., 2021; Cramer et al., 2017; De Zeeuw et al., 2004; Lin et al., 2021; Pembroke et al., 2012).…”