Intermittency of storms and substorms: is it related to the critical behaviour?

Abstract. Intermittency is one of the possible means of quantifying dynamics of fractal processes. In this paper, the analysis of the intermittency of magnetospheric storms and substorms is presented. The analysis allows for a classification of the processes in terms of the power-law scaling of the magnitude of deviations of the index values from the values at quiet times (normal state), and the relative timings of occurrences of such deviations. These are expressed in terms of the co-dimension and the Fano factor. The relationship between the two is related to the nature of the processes behind the observed storm and substorm dynamics. The results suggest that there is a similarity between the two, and therefore it is possible that there are common dynamical processes behind the storms and substorms. In particular, it appears that both of them behave consistently with what would be expected for critical systems, which is consistent with the conclusions of several previous works.