A statistical study of the properties of ions (O+, He+ and H+) measured by the Cluster-II in cusp region as a function of the solar wind dynamic pressure and geomagnetic index Kp respectively was made dur-ing the summer and fall of 2001-2003. The main results are that: (1) O+ ion density responds in a sig-nificant way to geomagnetic index Kp, and He+ ion density is not correlated with geomagnetic index Kp, both of them have a significant positive correlation with solar wind dynamic pressure; (2) H+ ion density is also observed to increase with solar wind dynamic pressure, and not correlated with geomagnetic index Kp.
Unlike the previous single (dual) satellite observation, the four ClusterII satellites make it possible to directly compute the continuous field-aligned current (FAC) density according to the magnetic data from them and to enable the investigation of the relationship between the FAC and geomagnetic activity. This paper analyzes the observation data when the Cluster satellites crossed the plasma sheet bound- ary layer (PSBL) in the magnetotail during the two magnetic storms in August to October 2001. According to the data, during the magnetic storms the relationship between the variations of FAC and AE index turned out to be: 1) FAC was obviously increasing during the storms; 2) FAC density was approximately negatively corre- lated with AE index from the sudden commencement to the early main phase of the storm; 3) they were approximately positively correlated during the late main phase and early recovery phase; 4) they were no apparent correlation during the late re- covery phase.
With the 4-s resolution data of the magnetometer and the ion plasma analyzer on TC-1 from June to November of each year during the period of 2004―2006, we statistically analyzed the occurrence rate of both convective and field-aligned bursty flows (FABFs). A near-Earth bursty bulk flow (NEBBF) occurred during both the quiet time and substorm process. In general, the magnetic field and the plasma density began oscillating with the appearance of the NEBBF associated with a distinct increase of the AE index. The increase of AE index during the NEBBF was more than 100 nT in both quiet time and substorm process. The statistical analysis indicated that the occurrence rates of the FABFs were nearly the same in the dif-ferent stages of the AE index, but the occurrence rate of the NEBBFs was much higher in the growth stage of the AE index, indicating that the NEBBFs were di-rectly related to the growth and expansion phases of the substorm. The observa-tions suggested that the quite large number of BBFs from the mid magnetotail could enter into the near-Earth tail and play important role in triggering the sub-storm onset.
