A number of current systems exist in the Earth's magnetosphere. It is very difficult to identify local measurements as belonging to a specific current system. Therefore, there are different definitions of supposedly the same current, leading to unnecessary controversy. This study presents a robust collection of these definitions of current systems in geospace, particularly in the near-Earth nightside magnetosphere, as viewed from a variety of observational and computational analysis techniques.

Magnetic reconnection is a ubiquitous process that drives global-scale dynamics in plasmas. For reconnection to proceed, both ion and electrons must be unfrozen in a localized diffusion region. By analyzing in situ measurements, we show that the non-gyrotropic ion pressure is mainly responsible for breaking the ion frozen-in condition in reconnection. The reported non-gyrotropic ion pressure tensor can specify the reconnection electric field that controls how quickly reconnection proceeds.

We investigate the precipitated-to-trapped flux ratio patterns near the proton isotropy boundary (IB) using NOAA-POES observations. For 30 and 80keV proton energies, we found only 31% of events showing the dispersion pattern predicted by the non-adiabatic scattering in the tail current sheet. Most frequent pattern had no measureable IB energy dispersion (63%); structured IBs with a few Jprec/Jtrap dropouts were also usual (60%). Roles of current sheet and wave-induced scattering are discussed.

In this study we use two-loop model SCW (SCW2L) to quantitatively investigate distortion of the ionospheric footpoint pattern in response to changes of different SCW2L parameters. Calculation results show that SCW-related footprint shifts result in formation of auroral bulge and westward travelling surge and may contribute to rotation of auroral streamers, and that SCW2L combined with the AM03 model nicely describes the azimuthal progression and the observed magnitude of the auroral expansion.