The Role of MHD Turbulence on Plasma Sheet Structure and Dynamics

There is a growing body of evidence that transport in the plasma sheet may be turbulent. In this study we use an enhanced resolution version of our global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation code to investigate the global aspects of turbulence in the tail. We examine the overall convection system that results and how it influences magnetospheric and ionospheric convection. As first step we consider the effects of turbulence for southward IMF when reconnection drives flows and vorticity in the tail. This will allow us to investigate the relationship between reconnection-driven convection and turbulence. The grid spacing and the resistivity are the two parameters that can be adjusted to influence the magnetic Reynolds number in the global MHD simulation. Explicit resistivity is necessary in our code for reconnection to occur. We set the resistivity to the smallest value that gives us a reconnecting magnetosphere. Then we investigated the effects of grid spacing on the nature of convection in the tail by carrying out simulations with different grids. We will present three cases: one with our present grid spacing (0.2 RE), one with intermediate resolution and one with grid resolution on the ion Larmor radius scale (0.05 RE).