Abstract

One of the main features of the magnetospheric substorm development is the plasma sheet heating. Such a heating is accompanied by the increase of the level of plasma velocity fluctuations and corresponding eddy-diffusion plasma transport. The theory of plasma sheet with medium scale turbulence gives the possibility to describe substorm plasma sheet dynamics including the change of the value of the plasma sheet diffusion coefficient during substorm expansion phase. The theory predictions are compared with the results of the observations of the satellite INTERBALL/Tail probe for a number of isolated substorms. The data of CORALL device are used to obtain the plasma velocity hodograms with 2-min resolution and the evolution of the correlation times of the velocity. It is shown that the velocity predictions are in a quite good agreement with the data of experimental observations.