O+ outflow during geomagnetic storms observed by Cluster satellites

Sammanfattning: The region of space dominated by the Sun's magnetic field is called the heliosphere. It envelops the entire solar system including Earth. Therefore, a strong coupling exists between the Sun and our planet. The Sun continuously ejects particles, the solar wind, and when these high energy particles hit Earth, the magnetosphere (the region around the Earth governed by the geomagnetic field) is affected. When the solar wind is enhanced this disturbs the magnetosphere and perturbations can be seen also in ground-based observations.The upper atmosphere is subjected to solar radiation that ionise the neutral atoms and molecules, this region is referred to as the ionosphere. In the ionosphere, some of the heavier ion populations, such as O+, are heated and accelerated through several processes and flow upward. In the polar regions these mechanisms are particularly efficient and when the ions have enough energy to escape the Earth's gravity, they move outward along open magnetic field lines and may be lost into interplanetary space. Ion outflow in general has already been well studied, however, ion outflow under extreme magnetospheric conditions has not been investigated in detail.Disturbed magnetospheric conditions correlate with solar active periods, such as coronal holes or the development of solar active regions. From these regions, strong ejections called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) emerge. When these extreme events interact with Earth, they produce a compression of the magnetosphere as well as reconnection between the terrestrial magnetic field lines and the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) lines, which most of the time leads to geomagnetic storms. The amounts of incoming solar particles and energy increase during geomagnetic storms and we also observe an increase in the O+ outflow.Our observations are made with the Cluster mission, a constellation of 4 satellites flying around Earth in the key magnetospheric regions where ion outflow is usually observed. In this thesis, we estimate O+ outflow under disturbed magnetospheric conditions and for several extreme geomagnetic storms. We find that O+ outflow lost into the solar wind increases exponentially with enhanced geomagnetic activity (Kp index) and increases about 2 orders of magnitude during extreme geomagnetic storms.