On the Origin of High-Latitude Boundary Layer of the Earth's Magnetosphere

Localization of the reconnection region at the dayside magnetopause is among the unsolved problems of magnetospheric physics. There are two alternative models, one of which predicts the reconnection at the equatorial magnetopause, and the other predicts the reconnection in the region where the magnetic field of the solar wind flowing around the magnetosphere is antiparallel to the geomagnetic field. The statistical analysis carried out for 53 INTERBALL-1crossings of the high-latitude magnetopause in a special coordinate frame invariant with respect to the interplanetary conditions shows that the model of a reconnection in antiparallel fields agrees well with the experimental data.