Non-locality of Earth's quasi-parallel bow shock: injection of thermal protons in a hybrid-Vlasov simulation

Battarbee, Markus; Ganse, Urs; Pfau-Kempf, Yann; Turc, Lucile; Brito, Thiago; Grandin, Maxime; Koskela, Tuomas; Palmroth, Minna

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-38-625-2020

Articles | Volume 38, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-38-625-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-38-625-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 38, issue 3

Regular paper

|

26 May 2020

Regular paper |

| 26 May 2020

Non-locality of Earth's quasi-parallel bow shock: injection of thermal protons in a hybrid-Vlasov simulation

Markus Battarbee, Urs Ganse, Yann Pfau-Kempf, Lucile Turc, Thiago Brito, Maxime Grandin, Tuomas Koskela, and Minna Palmroth

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Final revised paper (published on 26 May 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 21 Aug 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

AC1: 'Figure 6', Markus Battarbee, 11 Sep 2019
RC1: 'Referee Report for angeo-2019-115', Anonymous Referee #1, 26 Sep 2019
- AC2: 'Response to anonymous referee #1', Markus Battarbee, 20 Dec 2019
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 09 Dec 2019
- AC3: 'Response to anonymous referee #2', Markus Battarbee, 20 Dec 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (17 Jan 2020) by Yoshizumi Miyoshi

AR by Markus Battarbee on behalf of the Authors (27 Jan 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (07 Feb 2020) by Yoshizumi Miyoshi

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (10 Feb 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (11 Mar 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript has been significantly improved. A few comments have to be addressed before recommending for publishing.

While the non-locality and it's relation to the injection is in the title of the paper, there is very little major conclusions in the paper about this connection. For example, lines 378-285 discussing this relation are very weak, there is no efforts for example to check the statement "it may be related to a particularly strong local magnetic field twist or some other transient ". This is definitely a weakness of the paper, because if there is no strong conclusions on the importance of non-locality, the introduced term "non-locality" looses it's attraction. Reading the abstract the impression is that non-locality is not important and then there is a question, why it should be in the title?

l.91-99 What is conclusion from Toth et al. study? Is it ok to ignore the kinetic scales? Somehow after the reading the paragraph it is still not clear why underresolving the kinetic scales is ok to address the topic of the paper. What does it mean "correct scale separation between global and local dynamics"? What are "the number of ion kinetic effects"? Just writing down more specific what one is able and not able to do and which part of the injection problem one is addressing would help more readers.

Figure 5:
I am very confused about the transmitted particle plot. What does it mean that at high energies the energy decrease is negative only? How particles can arrive to that region in the first place if they start at low energies?

I am also confused about 5e and 5g plots. Upstream in the solar wind we should have mainly 10eV particles but the logarithmic count statistics lines show few particles around those energies. This is particularly clear in 5g. How am I supposed to interpret this?

I am also surprised that there is no increasing heating at the shock itself (dx=0).

The maximum penetration depth downstream (1.2RE) is relatively close to the maximum non-locality values (1.2RE). Can it be that it is not penetration downstream but that those are the cases with highest non-locality measure and thus the cases where the shock position can be at negative dx values.

l.258 Please specify the Maxwellian temperatures in eV in the paper. It is easier comparison with the other data in the manuscript where energy is measured in eV.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (29 Mar 2020) by Yoshizumi Miyoshi

AR by Markus Battarbee on behalf of the Authors (14 Apr 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (21 Apr 2020) by Yoshizumi Miyoshi

AR by Markus Battarbee on behalf of the Authors (23 Apr 2020) Manuscript

Short summary

The structure and medium-scale dynamics of Earth's bow shock and how charged solar wind particles are reflected by it are studied in order to better understand space weather effects. We use advanced supercomputer simulations to model the shock and reflected ions. We find that the thickness of the shock depends on solar wind conditions but also has small-scale variations. Charged particle reflection is shown to be non-localized. Magnetic fields are important for ion reflection.