How to resolve decades-old mysteries regarding space-time structuring of the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere system.

Abstract:

Significant progress has been made in our understanding of Magnetosphere-Ionosphere coupling physics. Meso-scale processes, however, present a significant challenge since they are dynamic, structured and often has a short lifetime. Such features are often seen in the auroral display and are manifestations of energy and momentum transport between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere. Despite decades of extensive focus on such M-I processes our knowledge largely remains at the level of simplistic sketches. These shortcomings in our understanding are largely due to observational challenges. Advancing our understanding and resolving the many conflicting hypotheses will require the ability to: (1) make definitive quantitative measurements of field-aligned currents; (2) separate spatial and temporal variations; and (3) spatially relate multi-parameter observations to the meso-scale process itself. In this paper we argue that these M-I processes are key to our understanding of the system and that past fortuitous mission conjunctions have shown the path towards resolving these compelling M-I problems. The methodology has been proven but the dedicated comprehensive observations remain missing.