Statistical Relationship between Sawtooth Oscillations and Geomagnetic Storms

Abstract

We have investigated a statistical relationship between sawtooth oscillations and geomagnetic storms during 2000-2004. First of all we selected a total of 154 geomagnetic storms based on the Dst index, and distinguished between different drivers such as Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) and Co-rotating Interaction Region (CIR). Also, we identified a total of 48 sawtooth oscillation events based on geosynchronous energetic particle data for the same 2000-2004 period. We found that out of the 154 storms identified, 47 storms indicated the presence of sawtooth oscillations. Also, all but one sawtooth event identified occurred during a geomagnetic storm interval. It was also found that sawtooth oscillation events occur more frequently for storms driven by CME (˜62%) than for storms driven by CIR (˜30%). In addition, sawtooth oscillations occurred mainly (˜82%) in the main phase of storms for CME-driven storms while they occurred mostly (˜78%) during the storm recovery phase for CIR-driven storms. Next we have examined the average characteristics of the Bz component of IMF, and solar wind speed, which were the main components for driving geomagnetic storm. We found that for most of the sawtooth events, the IMF Bz corresponds to --15 to 0 nT and the solar wind speed was in the range of 400˜700 km/s. We found that there was a weak tendency that the number of teeth for a given sawtooth event interval was proportional to the southward IMF Bz magnitude.

Keywords

• sawtooth oscillation
• CME-driven storm
• CIR-driven storm