Strongly Southward IMF Substorms, Dynamic Pressure Disturbances, and Null Events

Solar wind discontinuities can lead to important large-scale disturbances that significantly affect the space environment, including energetic particle fluxes, the aurora, and magnetospheric and ionospheric current systems. Understanding what discontinuity characteristics lead to what kind of disturbance is thus critical for disturbance prediction and understanding. Global auroral images from the wideband imaging camera (WIC) on the IMAGE spacecraft show striking new information on this relationship. Two well-studied types of discontinuity driven disturbance are: substorms resulting from northward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) turnings and dynamic pressure (P) disturbances that result from enhancements of solar wind dynamic pressure. During typical substorms, auroral activity initiates near the equatorward boundary of the auroral oval within a ~1-2 hr MLT sector within the Harang electric-field reversal region and then expands to cover a few hours in MLT. Typical P disturbances show rapid global enhancement of auroral emissions as well as a significant poleward motion of the poleward boundary of the aurora, but enhancement related to the Harang reversal is not evident. The WIC images show that, during periods of strongly southward IMF, substorms expand to a significantly broader MLT range than do typical substorms, and that, in addition to a global auroral enhancement, P disturbances exhibit a substorm-like auroral enhancement within the Harang reversal that extends over a broad MLT range. These observations show that, for strongly southward IMF, both IMF and P changes cause Harang region activation. Because of this, it is reasonable to expect that IMF and P interplay effects may be important for solar wind discontinuities having both a significant IMF change and a significant P change. The WIC images show that such interplay effects can indeed be important. In particularly, discontinuities having a significant IMF northward turning and a significant decrease in P or having a significant increase in P and a significant southward turning of the IMF are found to not lead to a substorm-like aurora disturbance within the Harang reversal region. We refer to such events as "null events," since the IMF northward turning or P increase for each would, by themselves, be expected to cause a large substorm disturbance, but the effects of these appear to be nullified by the simultaneous change in the other quantity.