Response of the Earth's Magnetosphere and Ionosphere to Solar Wind Driver and Ionosphere Load: Results of Global MHD Simulations

Three-dimensional global magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the solar wind--magnetosphere-ionosphere system are carried out to explore the dependence of the magnetospheric reconnection voltage, the ionospheric transpolar potential, and the field aligned currents (FACs) on the solar wind driver and ionosphere load for the cases with pure southward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). It is shown that the reconnection voltage and the transpolar potential increase monotonically with decreasing Pedersen conductance (Σ_P), increasing southward IMF strength (B_s) and solar wind speed (v_sw). Moreover, both regions 1 and 2 FACs increase when B_s and v_sw increase, whereas the two currents behave differently in response to ∑_P. As ∑_P increases, the region 1 FAC increases monotonically, but region 2 FAC shows a non-monotonic response to the increase of ∑_P: it first increases in the range of (0,5) Siemens and then decreases for ∑_P > 5 Siemens.