Toward Consistent Understanding Of The Coupling Between The Ionosphere And Plasmasphere

The overarching objective of this study is to follow the transport and flow of plasma through the plasmasphere and ionosphere, and the exchange between them during geomagnetic storms. From the ionospheric point of view, storm time redistribution of plasma was observed in the GPS TEC [Mannuci et al 2005]. On the other hand in the plasmasphere, erosion, plumes and dynamic variation of the plasmapause were observed in the IMAGE EUV during the same Halloween storm period [Goldstein et al., 2005]. However, we do not have a good picture about how the plasma should be flowing between the ionosphere and plasmasphere during storms to explain both observations in a consistent manner. In order to address the coupling issues between the ionosphere and plasmasphere, we have developed the Ionosphere-Plasmasphere-Electrodynamics (IPE) model. It consists of a physics based model of an ionosphere and plasmasphere using the IGRF geomagnetic field configuration (APEX) with flexible spatial resolutions depending on the type of physical phenomena we would like to target. Furthermore, the global ionosphereic potential is solved self-consistently on the same grid to understand how fine structures of the ionospheric conductivity impact the electric potential, such as caused by Storm Enhanced Densities (SEDs). In this presentation, we will present TEC, a reconstruction of the IMAGE EUV, and the refilling flux along field lines obtained our model results.