A Revised Forest Fire Model Non-Quasistatically Driven for the Sporadic Activity of the Earth’s Magnetotail

Abstract

The energy release during magnetospheric substorms in response to solar wind changes consists of two main physical processes: the directly-driven and the unloading processes. Recent analysis on the sporadic activity related to the unloading process seems to indicate that the magnetospheric response to solar wind changes might resemble the behaviour of an out-of-equilibrium system near a marginally stable point (critical point). Here, we present a modified version of the well-known forest-fire cellular automaton (FFM) not quasistatically driven for the sporadic activity of the energy release in the geotail regions as revealed by the auroral electrojet index.