IMF-By dependence of transient ionospheric flow perturbation associated with sudden impulses: SuperDARN observations

Abstract

A statistical study using a large dataset of Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) observations is conducted for transient ionospheric plasma flows associated with sudden impulses (SI) recorded on ground magnetic field. The global structure of twin vortex-like ionospheric flows is found to be consistent with the twin vortices of ionospheric Hall current deduced by the past geomagnetic field observations. An interesting feature, which is focused on in this study, is that the flow structures show a dawn-dusk asymmetry depending on the combination of the polarity of SI and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF)-By. Detailed statistics of the SuperDARN observations reveal that the dawn-dusk asymmetry of flow vortices due to IMF-By appears during negative SIs, while such asymmetric characteristics are not seen during positive SIs. On the basis of the upstream observations, we suggest that this particular dawn-dusk asymmetry is caused by the interaction between the pre-existing round convection cell and a pair of the transient convection vortices associated with SIs.