Statistic study of oxygen ion outflow above the polar cap

A statistic study of the oxygen ion’s heating/accelerating near the polar cap has been made. The mechanism behind the heating/acceleration has also been investigated. The studies have been done to find incorrect data points and to investigate in which areas it is most common that incorrect data occurs. All the data are from the Codif instrument on board on the Cluster II satellites. The Cluster mission consists of four identical satellites, though in this paper data points from only one satellite have been used. The reason to why only one satellite has been used is to make it easier to interpret the results. The tool used to analyze the statistics has been the program Matlab. With help of three different programs written in Matlab incorrect data points has been sorted away and different variables have been compared with each other. The study has shown that the oxygen and hydrogen ions parallel bulk velocity are coupled with each other. Oxygen and hydrogen ions have the same parallel bulk velocity. Further on the study shows that the oxygen ions are not only heated by a low altitude source there are also a continuous heating of the oxygen ions when the ions are flowing out from the Earth.Validerat; 20101217 (root