Statistical characteristics of electron precipitation into the atmosphere

We studied the precipitation of magnetospheric energetic electrons into the Earth's atmosphere during magnetic storm times using precipitating electron flux data from the MEPED on board the NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES) low.altitude satellite, NOAA-16. We identified a total of 84 storm events between 2001 and 2012 using SYM-H index. We have done a superposition of precipitating electron fluxes for each of three energy ranges (i.e., e1: > 30 keV, e2: > 100 keV, e3: > 300 keV) for the identified storm times. The results show that the fluxes start to increase before the main phase of storm for all energy ranges and reach a maximum level just before the time of SYM-H minimum value. The precipitation timescales are energy-dependent, being shorter for lower energy, ~4.67 hours for e1, ~7.93 hours for e2 and ~26.5 hours for e3. The precipitating fluxes decline during the recovery phase of the storms. We examined the L shell dependence of the precipitating electron flux during the main phase. We found that statistically the precipitation fluxes are dominantly seen at L of ~ 3-4 or higher. This L value roughly corresponds to the plasmapause location during the main phase. Thus the results imply that the electron precipitation mainly occurs outside of the plasmapause. In addition, we classified the storm events by their strength and examined the dependence of precipitation on storm intensity. We found that the electron precipitation occurs on a faster time scale and penetrate into inner L shell region for a stronger storm.