SUBSTORM CURRENT IN THE EQUATORIAL PLANE OF THE MAGNETOSPHERE DEDUCEDFROM GROUND-BASED MAGNETOMETER CHAIN RECORDS

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of inferri ng the distribution of substorm electric currents in the equatorial pl ane on the basis of ionospheric current vectors and field-aligned curr ents during substorms; the ionospheric current vectors are obtained fr om the ground-based magnetometer network by using the KRM inversion al gorithm [Kamide et al., 1996] and the longitudinal and latitudinal cur rent loops proposed by Bostrom [1964]. A simple model of the magnetosp here is used to trace field lines for our demonstration purposes. It i s found that the calculated radial currents in the equatorial plane ar e in good agreement with the statistical results obtained by Iijima et al. [1990] on the basis of the satellite AMPTE/CCE data. We show also that the statistical azimuthal currents are mainly composed of the ri ng current and the cross-tail current. The ionospheric contribution to the azimuthal component is estimated to be about 20% of the total cur rent. Therefore both results deduced from the ground-based magnetomete r network and from AMPTE/CCE satellite data are useful in studding the distribution of substorm currents in the equatorial plane, in spite o f the fact that they are based on entirely different methods and that a simple magnetosphere model is used to trace field lines.