Diagnostics of Closed Magnetic Flux Depletion in the Near‐Earth Magnetotail During the Substorm Growth Phase

AbstractBased on magnetohydrodynamics simulations, it was recently suggested that magnetotail reconfiguration during the substorm growth phase results from combined action of two large‐scale processes: (1) open magnetic flux accumulation (OMFA) in the tail lobes and (2) closed magnetic flux depletion (CMFD) in the near‐Earth tail, caused by flux evacuation to the dayside magnetopause. Simultaneous action of uniform along the tail OMFA and strongly nonuniform CMFD leads to different rates of magnetic flux growth in different tail cross sections. According to Global magnetohydrodynamics simulations CMFD is about 35% of OMFA, the corresponding differences of magnetic flux increase in two‐tail cross sections at −7RE and −20RE being as large as 0.1–0.2 GWb. To study this effect on real data, we applied the recent method of magnetotail flux estimation (Shukhtina et al., ) to simultaneous Cluster and Geotail observations in the tail lobes. By finding such rare observations in the inner and middle magnetotail (at<X > −10 RE and − 21RE) we confirm a larger magnetic flux increase in the midtail, with the ratio between OMFA and CMFD comparable to that obtained in magnetohydrodynamics, although with a large scatter. These results confirm the scenario of two decoupled magnetotail regions with different convection regimes during the growth phase. Convection is depressed in the midtail plasma sheet, showing the pressure crisis in action inherent to tail‐like 2‐D magnetic configuration. At the same time convection is substantially enhanced in the inner magnetosphere, where the pressure crisis is solved due to azimuthal flux transport around the Earth, essentially a 3‐D effect.