American Geophysical Union, Geophysical Research Letters, 2(26), p. 177-180, 1999
DOI: 10.1029/1998gl900118
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During ~18 hours of continuous activity caused by long interval of southward IMF, the INTERBALL/Tail Probe and GEOTAIL spacecraft monitored the plasma sheet in dusk and dawn sectors of the midtail plasma sheet at 25-30 RE. While bursty bulk flows were persistently observed at both spacecraft, there was a systematic difference between the hourly averages of the Earthward flux transport. During a 3-hour interval the average flux transport rate (Ey) on GEOTAIL (dawn plasma sheet) was ~3 times larger than both the average Ey on INTERBALL (dusk plasma sheet), and the cross-tail Ey0 expected for the existing IMF conditions. This implies that the most intense bursty bulk flows tend to be confined within a limited longitudinal sector of the magnetotail (X