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NASA NTRS2019

Saturn Atmospheric Dynamics One Year After Cassini: Long-Lived Features and Time Variations in the Drift of the Hexagon

We examine Saturn's atmospheric dynamics with observations in the visible range from ground-based telescopes and Hubble Space Telescope (HST). We present a detailed analysis of observations acquired during 2018 obtaining drift rates of major meteorological systems from the equator to the North polar hexagon. A system of polar storms that appeared in the planet in March 2018 and remained active with a complex phenomenology at least until September is analyzed elsewhere [Sanchez-Lavega et al., 2019]. Many of the regular cloud features visible in 2018 are long-lived and can be identified in Saturn images in 2017, and in some cases, for up to a decade using also Cassini ISS images. Without considering the polar storms, the most interesting long-lived cloud systems are: i) A bright white spot in the Equatorial Zone that can be tracked continuously since 2014 with minimal changes in its zonal velocity, which was 444:3 +or- 3:1 ms(exp -1) in 2014 and 452:4 + or - 1:7 ms(exp -1) in 2018. This velocity is remarkably different from the zonal winds at the cloud level at its latitude during the Cassini mission, and is closer to zonal winds obtained at the time of the Voyagers flybys and to zonal winds from Cassini VIMS infrared images of the lower atmosphere. ii) A large long-lived Anticyclone Vortex, here AV, that formed after the Great White Spot of 2010-2011. This vortex has changed significantly in visual contrast, drift rate and latitude with minor changes in size over the last years. iii) A system of subpolar vortices at latitudes 60-65N present at least since 2011. These vortices and additional atmospheric features here studied follow drift rates consistent with zonal winds obtained by Cassini. We also present a study of the positions of the vertices of Saturn's North polar hexagon from 2015 to 2018. These measurements are compared with previous analyses during the Cassini mission (2007-2014), observations with HST in the 90s, and data from the Voyagers in 1980-1981 to explore the long term variability of the hexagon's drift rate. We find variations in the drift rate of the hexagon through these epochs that can not be fit by seasonal changes in the polar area. Instead, the different drift rates reinforce the role of the North Polar Spot that was present in the Voyager epoch and in the early 90s to cause a faster drift rate of the hexagon at that time compared with the current slower one.

R Hueso↗
NASA NTRS1975

Drift-free magnetic geometries in adiabatic

A class of two-dimensional drift-free fields, somewhat resembling the configuration found in the geomagnetic tail, is described; several proofs of the drift-free property are given, including some that suggest that the property of vanishing net drift might extend to nonadiabatic orbits. A general criterion for identifying drift-free fields was developed, and a case of motion in a nearly drift-free field was also investigated. The theory was applied to the plasma sheet in the earth's magnetotail, and observational evidence is presented suggesting that the magnetic field there does approach a drift-free configuration.

Stern, D. P.↗
NASA NTRS1977

Development of a drift-correction procedure for a direct-reading spectrometer

A procedure which provides automatic correction for drifts in the radiometric sensitivity of each detector channel in a direct-reading emission spectrometer is described. Such drifts are customarily controlled by the regular analyses of standards, which provide corrections for changes in the excitational, optical, and electronic components of the instrument. This standardization procedure, however, corrects for the optical and electronic drifts. It is a step that must be taken if the time, effort, and cost of processing standards is to be minimized. This method of radiometric drift correction uses a 1,000-W tungsten-halogen reference lamp to illuminate each detector through the same optical path as that traversed during sample analysis. The responses of the detector channels to this reference light are regularly compared with channel response to the same light intensity at the time of analytical calibration in order to determine and correct for drift. Except for placing the lamp in position, the procedure is fully automated and compensates for changes in spectral intensity due to variations in lamp current. A discussion of the implementation of this drift-correction system is included.

Chapman, G. B., II↗
NASA NTRS1979

Gradient and curvature drifts in magnetic fields with arbitrary spatial variation

It is shown that, for a magnetic field of arbitrary spatial variation, a nearly isotropic distribution of charged particles drifts with a velocity given by the usual first-order orbit theory drifts averaged over pitch angle. It is assumed that the near-isotropy brought about by scattering, but conclusions concerning drift are insensitive to the details of the scattering process. It is found that this drift velocity is correct even for arbitrarily large ratios of particle gyroradius to magnetic spatial scale, although this velocity must, like all drift effects, be viewed on a scale larger than a gyroradius. Hence for many astrophysical applications, such as cosmic rays, where anisotropies are small, the usual drift velocities provide a valid approximation to convective motions even if the magnetic field scales are very small.

Isenberg, P. A.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Gyrophase drifts and the orbital evolution of dust at Jupiter's Gossamer Ring

The 'gyrophase drift' phenomenon in Jupiter's fine-dust 'gossamer ring' is presently shown to exceed the plasma-drag drift, and may be able to move small, charged grains either toward or away from synchronous radius. The grain gyrophase drifts toward the higher temperature in the presence of a radial gradient in plasma temperature; gyrophase drift will also occur in conjunction with a radial gradient in the relative concentrations of different plasma ion species, or even due to plasma-grain velocity variation associated with the grain's cycloidal motion through the plasma. The Poynting-Robertson drift is noted to be diminutive by comparison with either the plasma-drag or gyrophase drifts.

Northrop, T. G.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Ion mixing in the plasma sheet boundary layer by drift instabilities

The linear stability properties of collisionless drift instabilities are analyzed in a Harris equilibrium model of the plasma sheet boundary layer (PSBL). The strearmng ions with drift-type instabilities driven in the PSBL are considered. The fluid approximation leads to growth but predicts that the mode width approaches the gyroradius of the energetic ions. Thus an integral equation theory for the modes is developed taking into account that in the PSBL the curvature drift is weak compared with the grad-B drift. The exact wave particle resonance is kept in the nonlocal response functions. Plasma density, temperature, and magnetic gradient drift motions are taken into account. The drift modes produce an anomalous cross-field momentum transport mixing the PSBL ions on the time scale of tens of seconds. A nonlinear simulation is performed which shows the coalescence of the small scale, fast growing modes into large-scale vortices. The relation between these collective modes and plasma sheet transport phenomena is discussed including the comparison with the competing plasma mixing from single-particle stochasticity.

Horton, W.↗
NASA NTRS1993

F region plasma drifts over Arecibo - Solar cycle, seasonal, and magnetic activity effects

Characteristics of low-latitude F region plasma drifts are determined on the basis of Arecibo incoherent scatter measurements from 1981 to 1990. The measurements show large day-to-day variability even during magnetically quiet periods. The average poleward/perpendicular plasma drifts do not change significantly with season and solar cycle except in the midnight-morning sector. The zonal drifts show clear solar cycle and seasonal effects. The plasma drifts along the magnetic field lines exhibit large altitudinal and seasonal variations, particularly near solar minimum, and are generally anticorrelated with the perpendicular/north drifts. The drift patterns observed by the Arecibo and the middle and upper atmosphere radars have significantly different seasonal dependences. This is explained by electrodynamic effects in the corresponding local and conjugate ionospheres.

Fejer, B. G.↗
NASA NTRS2023

Sea Ice Drift Tracks From Autonomous Buoys in the MOSAiC Distributed Network

A network of autonomous, ice-tethered buoys was deployed around the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) experiment in late September 2019 for a year-long drift in the Arctic Transpolar Drift Stream. The buoys were deployed as part of the MOSAiC distributed network (DN) which included 12 multi-instrumented ice stations and an additional 116 GPS buoys distributed primarily within a 40 km radius of the MOSAiC Central Observatory. Buoy coverage within the DN was maintained with additional deployments throughout the year-long drift allowing for collection of data over a full sea ice growth and melt cycle. All GPS position data from buoys deployed within the DN have been assembled and processed into the collection of 216 quality-controlled buoy drift tracks presented in this dataset covering the period 26 September 2019 – 23 May 2021. The drift tracks in this collection are ideal for studies of dynamic sea ice motion around the MOSAiC experiment at cascading spatial scales ranging from 100s of meters to 100s of km.

Angela C. Bliss↗
NASA NTRS1975

Note on the electric splitting of drift shells

A nonrelativistic analysis is presented for the deviation of a particle from its dipole magnetic drift shell in the presence of an electric field. An alternative definition of weak shell splitting is introduced in which the corotation drift velocity need not be small with respect to the azimuthal magnetic drift velocity. Approximate explicit solutions are obtained for the asymmetry of drift shells in the strong shell splitting case, i.e., for the case where the cross-magnetosphere potential drop is not small compared to particle kinetic energy. Upper limits to drift shell asymmetry are obtained from considerations of the Alfven layer.

Kivelson, M. G.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Prediction of ion drift effects on spacecraft floating potentials

The plasma environment of high altitude spacecraft was observed to involve ion drift velocities which sometimes become comparable to ion mean thermal speeds. Such drifts may cause an electrically isolated spacecraft surface to float at a substantially increased negative potential if it is simultaneously shaded and downstream relative to the drift direction. The results showed that: (1) the ion speed ratio at which drift effects become important (i.e. change the floating potential by at least 10 percent) can be as low as 0.1, and may be decreased if the ambient electrons are non-Maxwellian; (2) the effects of ion speed ratio increase with increasing ion-to-electron temperature ratio; and (3) negative floating potentials for drifting Maxwellian ion velocity distributions with speed ratio unity are typically about twice as large as the corresponding potentials for nondrifting conditions.

Chang, J. S.↗
NASA NTRS1982

Particle drift, diffusion, and acceleration at shocks

The gradient and curvature drifts implicit in change of the ambient magnetic field at a hydromagnetic shock wave are incorporated into the diffusive theory of shock acceleration of charged particles. The conventional jump condition at the shock is modified by a term incorporating the large drift along the shock plane. This term vanished identically for one-dimensional systems, but must be included in general for shocks which are finite in transverse extent or which have transverse structure. It is found that the effect of the drift is such that the transverse drift rate is proportional to the acceleration rate, and for perpendicular shocks is exactly equal to the rate of change of energy in the V x B electric field observed in the shock frame. This establishes a connection with the 'shock drift' models which neglect diffusion.

Jokipii, J. R.↗
NASA NTRS1987

Calculated nighttime eastward plasma drift velocities at low latitudes and their solar cycle dependence

After calculating ambient electron densities as a function of altitude, latitude and local time, a simplified expression is used to calculate F-region eastward plasma drifts given a zonal neutral wind model. The derived eastward plasma drift on a magnetic flux tube is examined as a function of the flux tube apex height. If the neutral wind is assumed to be independent of latitude the plasma drift maximizes along the flux tube which intercepts the F-region peak concentration at the Appleton anomaly. Above this altitude the velocity decreases to reflect a decrease in the flux tube integrated F-region Pedersen conductivity. For a latitude dependent wind the plasma drift tends to maximize along the flux tube which intercepts the F-peak at the dip equator. Above this altitude the drift decreases to reflect the latitude distribution of the wind.

Anderson, D. N.↗
NASA NTRS1988

The role of drifts in diffusive shock acceleration

The role played by shock-associated drifts during the diffusive acceleration of charged particles at collisionless MHD shocks is evaluated. In the rest frame of the shock, the total energy gained by a particle is shown to result from two coupled acceleration mechanisms, the usual first-order Fermi mechanism and the drift mechanism. When averaged over a distribution of particles, the ratio of the drift-associated energy gain to the total energy is found to be independent of the total energy at a given theta1 (the angle between the shock normal and the unperturbed upstream magnetic field) in agreement with theoretical predictions. No evidence is found for drift-associated deceleration, suggesting that drifts always augment acceleration.

Decker, R. B.↗
NASA NTRS1988

An assessment of the long-term drift in TOMS total ozone data, based on comparison with the Dobson network

Seven years of total ozone data derived from the TOMS instrument on Nimbus-7 are compared with results from 41 Dobson stations. In this study, a significant improvement in fit from previous studies is obtained using a model which assumes a change in the rate of drift between TOMS and Dobson around the middle of 1982. Results indicate that the TOMS measurements have drifted relative to the Dobson stations with a two-part linear trend of -0.25 + or - 0.17 percent per year during the period from launch to 6/30/82, and -0.51 + or - 0.21 percent per year during 7/1/82 - 10/31/85. The causes of this drift cannot be definitively separated between residual uncorrected drift in the TOMS instrument (a similar drift is apparent in the SBUV-Dobson comparisons), limited sensitivity of the TOMS to increases in tropospheric ozone, and the effect of local increases in pollution levels on individual Dobson stations.

Fleig, Albert J.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Drift wave instability in the Io plasma torus

A linear normal mode analysis of the drift wave instability in the Io plasma torus was carried out on the basis of the Richmond (1973) and Huang et al. (1990) analyses of drift waves in the vicinity of the earth's plasmapause. Results indicate that the outer torus boundary is linearly unstable to the growth of electrostatic drift waves. It is shown that the linear growth rate is proportional to the ion drift frequency and to the ratio of the flux tube charge content to the Jovian ionospheric Pedersen conductance. It is also shown that various theoretical models of global radial transport in Jupiter's atmosphere (including corotating convection, interchange diffusion, and transient flux tube convection) can be understood as plausible nonlinear evolutions of electrostatic drift waves.

Huang, T. S.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Low latitude electrodynamic plasma drifts - A review

The characteristics and driving mechanisms of low latitude ExB plasma drifts and electric fields particularly at F-region heights are reviewed. It is concluded that the general characteristics of the quiet-time plasma can be explained as resulting from E- and F-region dynamo and interhemispheric coupling processes. The disturbance dynamo effects are found to be responsible for the drift perturbations following the periods of enhanced magnetic activity. The prompt penetration of high-latitude electric fields to lower latitudes produces large perturbations on the upward/poleward drifts, but has no significant effect on the low-latitude and the equatorial zonal drifts. Detailed low-latitude and global numerical models for studying the characteristics of plasma drifts are capable of reproducing the latitudinal variation of the perturbation electric fields and their diurnal variations.

Fejer, B. G.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Particle drift in the Earth's plasma sheet

We generalize the derivation of the average gradient/curvature-drift for a flux tube filled with an isotropic distribution of particles at specified kinetic energy. The present treatment is restricted to a two-dimensional magnetic field with zero electric field, but it includes all chaotic and Speiser orbits, which do not correspond to the simple picture of gradient/curvature drift. We assume that particles are evenly distributed throughout the regions of phase space allowed by their energy and canonical momentum. This assumption is closely related but not exactly equivalent to the assumption of isotropic pitch-angle distribution. Our derivation assumes that the maximum Larmor radius is small compared to the scale length for equatorial variations in the flux tube volume, but it does not involve any restrictions on the curvature of the field line. The resulting expression for the drift rate is valid for situations where the particle drift velocity is comparable to the thermal speed in some regions. The apparent implication of this generalized treatment is that the existence of very complex non-adiabatic particle trajectories in the plasma sheet may not invalidate previous estimates of the average rate of particle drift out the sides of the tail, estimates that were made under the assumption of simple guiding-center drifts.

Wolf, R. A.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Initial Results of DC Electric Fields, Associated Plasma Drifts, Magnetic Fields, and Plasma Waves Observed on the C/NOFS Satellite

Initial results are presented from the Vector Electric Field Investigation (VEFI) on the Air Force Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite, a mission designed to understand, model, and forecast the presence of equatorial ionospheric irregularities. The VEFI instrument includes a vector DC electric field detector, a fixed-bias Langmuir probe operating in the ion saturation regime, a flux gate magnetometer, an optical lightning detector, and associated electronics including a burst memory. Compared to data obtained during more active solar conditions, the ambient DC electric fields and their associated E x B drifts are variable and somewhat weak, typically < 1 mV/m. Although average drift directions show similarities to those previously reported, eastward/outward during day and westward/downward at night, this pattern varies significantly with longitude and is not always present. Daytime vertical drifts near the magnetic equator are largest after sunrise, with smaller average velocities after noon. Little or no pre-reversal enhancement in the vertical drift near sunset is observed, attributable to the solar minimum conditions creating a much reduced neutral dynamo at the satellite altitude. The nighttime ionosphere is characterized by larger amplitude, structured electric fields, even where the plasma density appears nearly quiescent. Data from successive orbits reveal that the vertical drifts and plasma density are both clearly organized with longitude. The spread-F density depletions and corresponding electric fields that have been detected thus far have displayed a preponderance to appear between midnight and dawn. Associated with the narrow plasma depletions that are detected are broad spectra of electric field and plasma density irregularities for which a full vector set of measurements is available for detailed study. Finally, the data set includes a wide range of ELF/VLF/HF oscillations corresponding to a variety of plasma waves, in particular banded ELF hiss, whistlers, and lower hybrid wave turbulence triggered by lightning-induced sferics. The VEFI data represents a new set of measurements that are germane to numerous fundamental aspects of the electrodynamics and irregularities inherent to the Earth's low latitude ionosphere.

Pfaff, R.↗