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  1. Introduction: Magnetopause reconnection is known to impact the dayside ionosphere by driving fast ionospheric flows, auroral transients, and high-density plasma structures named polar cap patches. However, most of the observed reconnection impact is limited to one hemisphere, and a question arises as to how symmetric the impact is between hemispheres. Methods: We address the question using interhemispheric observations of poleward moving radar auroral forms (PMRAFs), which are a “fossil” signature of magnetopause reconnection, during a geomagnetic storm. We are particularly interested in the temporal repetition and spatial structure of PMRAFs, which are directly affected by the temporal and spatial variation of magnetopause reconnection. PMRAFs are detected and traced using SuperDARN complemented by DMSP, Swarm, and GPS TEC measurements. Results: The results show that PMRAFs occurred repetitively on time scales of about 10 min. They were one-to-one related to pulsed ionospheric flows, and were collocated with polar cap patches embedded in a Tongue of Ionization. The temporal repetition of PMRAFs exhibited a remarkably high degree of correlation between hemispheres, indicating that PMRAFs were produced at a similar rate, or even in close synchronization, in the two hemispheres. However, the spatial structure exhibited significant hemispherical asymmetry. In the Northern Hemisphere, PMRAFs/patches had a dawn-dusk elongated cigar shape that extended >1,000 km, at times reaching >2,000 km, whereas in the Southern Hemisphere, PMRAFs/patches were 2–3 times shorter. Conclusion: The interesting symmetry and asymmetry of PMRAFs suggests that both magnetopause reconnection and local ionospheric conditions play important roles in determining the degree of symmetry of PMRAFs/patches. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 13, 2024
  2. Abstract

    The present study uncovers the fine structures of magnetosonic waves by investigating the EFW waveforms measured by Van Allen Probes. We show that each harmonic of the magnetosonic wave may consist of a series of elementary rising‐tone emissions, implying a nonlinear mechanism for the wave generation. By investigating an elementary rising‐tone magnetosonic wave that spans a wide frequency range, we show that the frequency sweep rate is likely proportional to the wave frequency. We studied compound rising‐tone magnetosonic waves, and found that they typically consist of multiple harmonics in the source region, and may gradually become continuous in frequency as they propagate away from source. Both elementary and compound rising‐tone magnetosonic waves last for ∼1 min which is close to the bounce period of the ring proton distribution, but their relation is not fully understood.

     
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  3. Abstract

    We report the first observations of the association between equatorward extending streamers and overshielding using the THEMIS all‐sky imagers and ground magnetometers. Because auroral streamers indicate plasma sheet flow bursts, these observations uncover the effect of flow bursts on overshielding. Results show that, in general, bright equatorward extended streamers were associated with an increase in equatorial electrojet (EEJ) on the nightside and a decrease in the dayside EEJ, indicating a striking correspondence between auroral streamers and overshielding conditions. Thus, the driving of overshielding at equatorial latitudes can be identified via bright equatorward extended streamers, indicating that flow bursts are an alternate means to discern the earthward injections that increase the region 2 field aligned currents and associated overshielding electric fields. Repetitive auroral streamers were associated with repetitive overshielding, resulting in a stepwise development of the dayside and nightside EEJ. The stepwise intensifications were also observed in the midlatitude positive bay and Pi2 pulsations. Our results could explain the occurrence of overshielding conditions at equatorial latitudes during substorms and nonsubstorm times without a northward turning of IMF‐Bz. As seen through streamers, the localized current structures (wedgelets) associated with flow bursts giving injection that leads to overshielding is titled northeast‐to‐southwest. Our results add a new element to the understanding of high‐to‐low latitude electrodynamical coupling by demonstrating the association between bright equatorward extended auroral streamers and enhanced shielding electric fields caused by earthward injections associated with flow bursts.

     
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  4. null (Ed.)
    Error-bounded lossy compression is a state-of-the-art data reduction technique for HPC applications because it not only significantly reduces storage overhead but also can retain high fidelity for postanalysis. Because supercomputers and HPC applications are becoming heterogeneous using accelerator-based architectures, in particular GPUs, several development teams have recently released GPU versions of their lossy compressors. However, existing state-of-the-art GPU-based lossy compressors suffer from either low compression and decompression throughput or low compression quality. In this paper, we present an optimized GPU version, cuSZ, for one of the best error-bounded lossy compressors-SZ. To the best of our knowledge, cuSZ is the first error-bounded lossy compressor on GPUs for scientific data. Our contributions are fourfold. (1) We propose a dual-quantization scheme to entirely remove the data dependency in the prediction step of SZ such that this step can be performed very efficiently on GPUs. (2) We develop an efficient customized Huffman coding for the SZ compressor on GPUs. (3) We implement cuSZ using CUDA and optimize its performance by improving the utilization of GPU memory bandwidth. (4) We evaluate our cuSZ on five real-world HPC application datasets from the Scientific Data Reduction Benchmarks and compare it with other state-of-the-art methods on both CPUs and GPUs. Experiments show that our cuSZ improves SZ's compression throughput by up to 370.1x and 13.1x, respectively, over the production version running on single and multiple CPU cores, respectively, while getting the same quality of 
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  5. Abstract

    Terrestrial ring current dynamics are a critical part of the near‐space environment, in that they directly drive geomagnetic field variations that control particle drifts, and define geomagnetic storms. The present study aims to specify a global and time‐varying distribution of ring current proton using geomagnetic indices and solar wind parameters with their history as input. We train an artificial neural network (ANN) model to reproduce proton fluxes measured by the Radiation Belt Storm Probes Ion Composition Experiment instrument onboard Van Allen Probes. By choosing optimal feature parameters and their history length, the model results show a high correlation and a small error between model specifications and satellite measurements. The modeled results well capture energy‐dependent proton dynamics in association with geomagnetic storms, including inward radial diffusion, acceleration and decay. Our ANN model produces proton fluxes with their corresponding 3D spatiotemporal variations, capturing the latitudinal distribution and local time asymmetry that are consistent with observations and that can further inform theory.

     
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