EGU21-12667
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12667
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

On Magnetic Helicity and Field-Aligned Currents in the Polar Ionosphere

Paola De Michelis1, Giuseppe Consolini2, Tommaso Alberti2, Vincenzo Carbone3, Roberta Tozzi1, Igino Coco1, and Fabio Giannattasio1
Paola De Michelis et al.
  • 1Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Rome, Italy (paola.demichelis@ingv.it)
  • 2INAF-Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome, Italy
  • 3Dip. Fisica, Università della Calabria, Rende, Italy

Magnetic helicity, which is a measure of twist and linkage of magnetic field lines, is a useful quantity to investigate some processes occurring in space plasmas. In particular, there is a strong link between magnetic helicity, magnetic flux structures, turbulence and dissipation. We investigate the connection between the reduced magnetic helicity and the structure of field-aligned currents in the high-latitude ionosphere using high resolution (50 Hz) magnetic data collected on board the ESA Swarm constellation. We show the existence of a clear link between the multiscale coarse-grained structure of reduced magnetic helicity and the field-aligned currents. This finding strongly supports the idea that turbulence processes might be at the origin of the observed small-scale current structures. A discussion of the relevance of our results in the framework of the filamentary nature of the field-aligned current is also presented.

This work is supported by Italian PNRA under contract PNRA18_00289-A “Space weather in Polar Ionosphere: the Role of Turbulence ".

How to cite: De Michelis, P., Consolini, G., Alberti, T., Carbone, V., Tozzi, R., Coco, I., and Giannattasio, F.: On Magnetic Helicity and Field-Aligned Currents in the Polar Ionosphere, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-12667, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12667, 2021.

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