Temporal features of the refilling of a plasmaspheric flux tube

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Abstract
Time‐dependent hydrodynamic equations were solved in order to study the refilling of plasmaspheric flux tubes depleted during magnetic storms. Depending on the initial density profiles in the depleted flux tube, a variety of shock formations occur during the early stage (∼1 hour) of the refilling. After this early stage, an important feature of the flow is the formation of a pair of shocks, which propagate down, one in each hemisphere. The refilling occurs by the downward propagating shocks with speeds 3Ti, where Ti is the ion temperature.