Abstract
The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is a collection of
radars built to study ionospheric convection. We use a 7-year archive of
SuperDARN convection maps, processed in 3 different ways, to build a
statistical understanding of dusk-dawn asymmetries in the convection
patterns. We find that the dataset processing alone can introduce a bias
which manifests itself in dusk-dawn asymmetries. We find that the solar
wind clock angle affects the balance in the strength of the convection
cells. We further find that the location of the positive potential foci
is most likely observed at latitudes of 78◦ for long periods
(>300 minutes) of southward IMF, as opposed to 74◦ for
short periods (<20 minutes) of steady IMF. For long steady
dawnward IMF the median is also at 78◦. For long steady periods of
duskward IMF, the positive potential foci tends to be at lower latitudes
than the negative potential and vice versa during dawnward IMF. For long
periods of steady Northward IMF, the positive and negative cells can
swap sides in the convection pattern.We find that they move from
~0-9 MLT to 15 MLT or ~15-23 MLT to 10
MLT, which reduces asymmetry in the average convection cell locations
for Northward IMF. We also investigate the width of the region in which
the convection returns to the dayside, the return flow width.
Asymmetries in this are not obvious, until we select by solar wind
conditions, when the return flow region is widest for the negative
convection cell during Southward IMF.