Simulating radiation belt electron dynamics with substorm injection using DREAM3D coupled with RCM-I model

Abstract:

Previous studies have shown that the realistic and event-specific input of electron seed population at 100s keV is critical to reproduce the local acceleration of radiation belt electrons to relativistic energies. The seed population was derived using observations from Van Allen Probes data in our simulation of radiation belt dynamics using the 3D Dynamic Radiation Environment Assimilation Model (DREAM3D). But the real-time observations have limited coverage in space and time and intensive interpolation is required to be performed on the data. In this study, we couple the DREAM3D code with the inertialized Rice Convection Model (RCM-I) to simulate the dynamics of radiation belt electrons with global specification of the seed population from the RCM-I model. The RCM-I is an improved model based on RCM, which has the new capability to simulate fast flows from the tail during substorms and provide more realistic distribution of seed electrons. We will compare results from different runs of the coupled model with seed electrons derived from sparse observations, the classic RCM model, and the new RCM-I model to demonstrate the importance of realistic specification of the seed population in reproducing the observed radiation belt dynamics.