Аннотация:1. The title of the paper (‘Van Allen Radiation Belts’) prescribes this notion to one person and neglects the history of the discovery of the radiation belts. The term ‘Van Allen Radiation Belts’ is not precise. It is not true if one remembers the names of S.N.Vernov and his colleagues in the USSR (who performed the first in situ measurements in 1958 and deeply investigated the phenomenon later onand other authors, who contributed in theory and experiments to this discovery in the great measure even earlier, see e.g. [1, 2]. 2. The interpretation based on the concepts of ‘radial acceleration’ versus ‘local acceleration’ is not unique and has tentative character because of the lack of sufficiently detailed 3D information about space-time dependence of the electron phase space density.\The observed correlation of chorus wave power and increases of relativistic electron flux is consistent with the hypothesis that chorus waves are responsible for local acceleration in the heart of the radiation belts during the event of October 9, 2012. The authors do not indicate this important caution in the main text nor in the abstract of the paper, which sounds too affirmative and too general. One can agree with the statement that «it is possible that radial acceleration may dominate in other relativistic acceleration electron events». 3. The authors do not mark an important point that the waves are playing many different roles simultaneously. They could participate in the acceleration of some group of electrons, deceleration and scattering in the momentum space, as well as transport particles in the coordinate space. The puzzle of the relativistic electron populations in the dynamics of the Earth’s radiation belts remains unsolved in the quantitative measure and even in the qualitative aspects: many satellite observations show sometimes local decreases, sometimes increases or no reaction associated with geomagnetic storms. Why so? What could be the global situation in each case? Future studies are needed to pinpoint quantitatively the nonlocal and nonlinear interplay between waves and particles in the radiation belts. I am grateful to Dr. G.D. Reeves for useful correspondence about my comments.
References 1. Panasyuk, M. I. Coming of age and development of space physics at Moscow State University. Radiation in space: The legacy of S. N. Vernov. Phys. Usp. 54, 190–202 (2011) 2. (http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/whtrap1.html)