Abstract
The onset of an auroral substorm is generally thought to occur on a quiet, homogeneous auroral arc. We present a statistical study of independently-selected substorm onset arcs and find that over 902688 of auroral beads have small amplitudes relative to the background, making them invisible without quantitative analysis. This confirms that auroral beads are highly likely to be ubiquitous to all onset arcs, rather than a special case phenomena as previously thought. Moreover, as these auroral beads grow exponentially through onset, we conclude that a magnetospheric plasma instability is fundamental to substorm onset itself.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 2078-2087 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Geophysical Research Letters |
Volume | 44 |
Issue number | 5 |
Early online date | 4 Mar 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 16 Mar 2017 |
Externally published | Yes |