| dc.description.abstract | Space weather explores dynamics between the Sun- interplanetary medium and the Earth’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere. Space weather is known for causing disturbances in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and these disturbances are rapid changes in the amplitude and phase of a signal that a receiver receives, known as scintillations. This reduces accuracy in GNSS based technology. Just like terrestrial weather, space weather can not be controlled, but with a sufficiently good forecasting model we can predict and prepare for the weather that is to come. In 1961 it was suggested by Dungey that interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) carried by the plasma in the solar wind would interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere, through magnetic reconnection. A southward facing IMF can magnetically reconnect at the dayside, causing magnetospheric convection. During this process the plasma located in the ionosphere would get carried by the convecting magnetic field, causing areas of higher density plasma to occur at the dayside ionosphere.These areas of high-density plasmas are called polar cap patches when propagating through the polar cap. When these patches exit at the auroral oval, they form plasma blobs. These blob structures are known to cause significant scintillations and it is therefore interesting to predict when and where these blobs occur. This paper aims to determine whether the Expanding/Contracting Polar Cap (ECPC) paradigm can be used as a basis for such a forecasting model. The model calculates the convection. We use this convection to calculate the E×B-drift, from the changing polar cap flux that the polar cap patches would drift with. We place tracer particles along the dayside OCB to study the propagation of a polar cap patch. We observe that the model produces different propagation in response to different time series of reconnection rates. We estimate that the dynamics not included in the model has varying effects on accuracy in propagation prediction. This include flow channels, that we estimate reduce propagation time by 10 minutes if we assume mean drift velocity to be 400m/s. As for the assumption of a symmetrical twin-cell convection pattern, we determine this to make for larger uncertainties. A tracer particle would have smaller uncertainties in propagation times if it started closer to noon, but closer to dawn/dusk would lead to more uncertainties and odd behaviour in the model. | eng |