Polar study of ionospheric ion outflow versus energy input

[1] A statistical study of the ion outflow versus energy input is performed by using multi-instrument data (TIDE, EFI, MFI, HYDRA) from Polar during its perigee auroral passes in the year 2000. Several important physical quantities connected to the ion outflow have been investigated, including the Poynting flux from the perturbation fields (below 1/6 Hz), the electron density, temperature, and the electron energy flux. The perturbation fields used here to calculate the Poynting flux may be associated with the small-scale quasi-static field structures of the field-aligned currents or/and the very low frequency Alfvén waves (below 1/6 Hz), which are both proven to be important energy sources for powering the aurora. Our results show that the field-aligned ion outflow flux correlates best with the Earth-directed Poynting flux and the precipitating electron density and also demonstrates almost no correlation with the electron energy flux and temperature. The findings from this Polar study are similar to those from FAST. The general corroboration between the independent data sets of the two spacecraft suggests that the empirical ion outflow scaling laws can be established, which will be beneficial to global simulation efforts. Our results show that at 6000 km altitudes fi = 10 6.836±0.028S0.535±0.086 and fi = 106.650±0.063ne 0.484±0.147, where fi is the total field-aligned ion outflow flux in 1/cm 2/s, S is the Poynting flux in ergs/cm2/s, and ne is the electron density in 1/c