High resolution modeling of the cusp density anomaly

The Earth's magnetospheric cusp provides direct access of energetic particles to the thermosphere causing an ionization anomaly. The energy from these particles along with Joule heating, and ion drag forcing play a direct role in determining the neutral density structure in the cusp region. Measurements by the CHAMP (390-460 km altitudes) have shown a region of strong enhanced density attributed to upwelling caused by the combination of particle and Joule heating. The Streak mission (325-123 km) observed a relative depletion in density in the cusp which was attributed to soft particle precipitation not being adequate to cause upwelling at the lower altitudes sampled by Streak and relatively harder precipitation in adjacent areas. Recent attempts to model the cusp density anomaly with Global Circulation Models (GCM) have focused on extreme cases with forcing extending over latitudinal cusp widths of 4 degrees or more which are at the extreme upper end of the observations. Even at one degree latitudinal resolution the cusp features are marginally captured. More typical cusps widths of 1-2 degrees in latitude require finer resolution to resolve. We use a high-resolution numerical model of the thermosphere to simulate the atmospheric response to the relevant forcing by realistically specifying the particle heating, Joule heating, and ion drag forcing to examine the dependence of the magnitude of the cusp density anomaly and the corresponding wind structure on the characteristics of the forcing in the cusp. We ran simulations for cusp widths of 4 and 2 degrees latitude using a model resolution of 20 km. We found that reducing the cusp width by half reduced the density response in the cusp by half, but that the wind response was only slightly decreased. We compare the model results to CHAMP and Streak observations and assess the relative contributions of these mechanisms in explaining the distinctive features of the observations. Acknowledgements: This research was supported by The Aerospace Corporation's Technical Investment program