Are Storm-Time Substorms Triggered or Spontaneous?

Abstract

Magnetic storms are almost always accompanied with substorms or substorm-like disturbances. Understanding the nature of the storm-time substorm is important for the currently critical issue of the storm-substorm relation. In this work we have done a statistical analysis in a straightforward way to see whether the storm-time substorms are preferably spontaneous or triggered. On the basis of 301 storm-time substorms selected for this work, we have found that the occurrence of about 28% of them was spontaneous while only 6.5% were associated with a clear trigger(s). The rest of the events were mostly associated with complex variations of IMF. The significant percentage for the spontaneous substorms implies that the possibility of finding a storm without a substorm is greatly reduced due to the spontaneous occurrence of the substorm even when the solar wind and IMF condition remains completely steady during the storm time.

Keywords

• storm
• substorm
• IMF