3-D force-balanced magnetospheric configurations

Abstract. The knowledge of plasma pressure is essential for many physics applications in the magnetosphere, such as computing magnetospheric currents and deriving magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling. A thorough knowledge of the 3-D pressure distribution has, however, eluded the community, as most in situ pressure observations are either in the ionosphere or the equatorial region of the magnetosphere. With the assumption of pressure isotropy there have been attempts to obtain the pressure at different locations,by either (a) mapping observed data (e.g. in the ionosphere) along the field lines of an empirical magnetospheric field model, or (b) computing a pressure profile in the equatorial plane (in 2-D) or along the Sun-Earth axis (in 1-D) that is in force balance with the magnetic stresses of an empirical model. However, the pressure distributions obtained through these method