Time-dependent Tomographic Estimation of Global Exospheric Hydrogen
Density During Geomagnetic Storms.
Abstract
During geomagnetic storms, charge exchange between neutral hydrogen (H)
atoms in the terrestrial exosphere and H+ and O+ ions in the ring
current serves to dissipate magnetospheric energy through the generation
of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs), which escape Earth’s gravity on
ballistic trajectories. Imaging of the resulting ENA flux is a
well-known technique to infer the ring current ion distribution, but its
accuracy depends critically on the specification of the exospheric H
density distribution. Although measurements of H airglow emission
exhibit storm-time variations, the H density distributions used in ENA
image inversion are typically assumed to be static, and the current lack
of knowledge regarding global exospheric evolution during storms
represents an important source of error in investigations of ring
current dynamics. In this work, we present a new technique to
reconstruct the global, 3D, and time-dependent H density distribution
from observations of its optically thin emission at 121.6 nm (Lyman-α)
acquired from the Lyman-alpha detectors onboard the NASA TWINS
satellites. The technique is based on our recent development of a robust
tomographic inversion algorithm, which is modified to incorporate the
temporal dimension via Kalman filtering. We present the first
time-dependent reconstructions of exospheric structure during
geomagnetic storms, which exhibit pronounced dayside density
enhancements and a strong anti-correlation with the DST index.