What makes the difference between sawtooth and steady mangetospheric convection events?

Both sawtooth events and steady magnetospheric convection (SMC) events are known to occur during strongly to moderately solar wind driven periods. While sawtooth events are characterized by recurring substorm-like activity in the ionosphere, the SMC events are periods with elevated but rather steady auroral electrojet activity. This poster presents a superposed epoch analysis of a set of 138 sawtooth events and 122 SMC events from the years 1998-2002. We examine the similarities and differences during these two types of events as the typical behaviour of the: 1) interplanetary magnetic field and solar wind parameters to characterize the driver conditions, 2) geostationary particle injection and magnetic field inclination to study the configuration of the inner magnetosphere as well as 3) auroral electrojet (AE/AL) and polar cap indices to determine the ionospheric activity and the coupling efficiency between the driving solar wind and the magnetosphere-ionosphere system.