A new interhemispheric 16‐moment model of the plasmasphere‐ionosphere system: IPIM

We present a new interhemispheric numerical model: the IRAP plasmasphere-ionosphere model (IPIM). This model describes the transport of the multispecies ionospheric plasma from one hemisphere to the other along convecting and corotating magnetic field lines, taking into account source processes at low altitude such as photoproduction, chemistry, and energization through the coupling with a kinetic code solving the transport of suprathermal electron along the field line. Among the new developments, a 16-moment-based approach is used for the transport equations in order to allow development of strong temperature anisotropy at high altitude and we consider important but often neglected effects, such as inertial acceleration (centrifugal and Coriolis). In this paper, after presenting in detail the principle of the model, we focus on preliminary results showing the original contribution of this new model. For these first runs, we simulate the convection and corotation transport of closed flux tubes in the plasmasphere for tilted/eccentric dipolar magnetic field configuration in solstice and equinox conditions. We follow different flux tubes between 1.2 and 6 Earth Radii (RE) and demonstrate the capability of the model to describe a wide range of density (above 15 orders of magnitude). The relevance of the mathematical approach used is highlighted, as anisotropies can develop above 3000 km in the plasmasphere as a result of the mirroring effect related to the anisotropic pressure tensor. Moreover, we show that the addition of inertial acceleration may become critical to describe plasma interhemispheric transport above 4RE. The ability of the model to describe the external plasmasphere is demonstrated, and innovative studies are foreseen, regarding the dynamics of the plasma along the magnetic field lines (in particular interhemispheric exchanges and “opening”/“closure” of a flux tube).

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