Measurement of the magnetotail reconnection rate

Abstract

A technique to measure the magnetotail reconnection rate from the ground is described and applied to 71 hours of measurements from 20 nights. The reconnection rate is obtained from the ionospheric flow across the polar cap boundary in the frame of reference of the boundary, measured by the Sondrestrom incoherent scatter radar. For our measurements, the polar cap boundary is located using 6300 Å auroral emissions and E region electron density. The average experimental uncertainty of the reconnection rate measurement is 11.6 mV m −1 in the ionospheric electric field. By using a large data set, we obtain the dependence of the reconnection rate on magnetic local time, the interplanetary magnetic field, and substorm activity, with much higher accuracy. We find that two thirds of the average polar cap potential drop occurs over the 4‐hour segment of the separatrix centered on 2330 MLT, that the linear correlation between the reconnection electric field and the half‐wave rectified dawn‐dusk solar wind electric field VB s peaks between 1.0 and 1.5 hours, with a maximum linear correlation coefficient of 0.46 at 70 min; and that following substorm expansion phase onset, the reconnection electric field becomes larger than the experimental uncertainty, with an average delay of 23 min. The 70‐min delay of the reconnection rate with respect to VB s is a typical convection time for a flux tube across the polar cap. This result indicates that reconnection in the magnetotail is influenced by the solar wind electric field VB s on the field line being reconnected.