The occurrence of shock waves in the terrestrial polar wind was predicted many years ago by a time-dependent three-dimensional model based on hydrodynamic equations. These shocks were seen to occur for counterstreaming ion populations and for cases when a convecting flux tube entered a region of sharply increasing electron temperature, such as the dayside cusp. Other studies conducted at about the same time showed that the shocks induced by counterstreaming ion populations may simply be artifacts of the adopted hydrodynamic model. The validity of shocks induced by electron temperature enhancements has remained an open question. Using a macroscopic particle-in-cell (PIC) code, we have verified the hydrodynamic prediction that sudden electron temperature enhancements can launch shock waves in a convecting flux tube of plasma. Our simulation follows a flux tube as it convects antisunward across the dayside auroral oval, the polar cap, and the nightside auroral oval. The electron temperature at 2000 km altitude is assumed to be relatively low (3000 K) in the subauroral ionosphere and in the polar cap but much higher (7000 K) in the dayside and nightside auroral oval. As the flux tube enters the auroral oval, either on the dayside or the nightside, forward and reverse shock pairs in the H+ component of the plasma are created at the bottom of the flux tube and propagate upward until they exit the simulation region at the top. The forward and reverse shock fronts propagate at speeds greater than and less than the drift speed of the H+ gas, respectively. ¿1996 American Geophysical Union.