Fully adiabatic changes in storm time relativistic electron fluxes

Abstract

It has been suggested that much of the drop and subsequent recovery of storm time relativistic electron fluxes at geosynchronous orbit can be explained in terms of a fully adiabatic response (all three adiabatic invariants conserved) to magnetic field changes. To calculate this effect, we assume a prestorm electron flux distribution constructed from CRRES satellite data, we use modular magnetospheric magnetic field models to represent the magnetic field configuration before and during the storm, and we use Liouville's theorem to evolve the prestorm electron flux. In this work we focus on the important special case of equatorially mirroring electrons. During the main phase of a storm with a Dst minimum of −100 nT we find that the fully adiabatic effect can cause a flux decrease of up to 2 orders of magnitude, consistent with observed flux decreases. We also find that the magnitude of the fully adiabatic flux decrease is larger for lower energies, again in agreement with observations. The contribution of prestorm electron fluxes to the recovery phase flux increase at synchronous orbit is expected to be small because of losses to the dawnside magnetopause. A comparison of fully adiabatic fluxes with measured electron fluxes for the November 2–5, 1993, storm indicates that for this event the fully adiabatic effect may be contributing to the observed decrease but that nonadiabatic effects are clearly important. Overall we conclude that the fully adiabatic effect can account for a significant fraction of observed flux decreases and that differences between the observed and the fully adiabatic fluxes help to clarify when and where additional loss and source mechanisms exist.