Ionospheric & Magnetospheric Magnetic fields

Project (2024-2025)

The time-varying geomagnetic field is a superposition of contributions from multiple internal and external current systems. A major source of geomagnetic variations at periods less than a few years are current systems external to the solid Earth, namely the ionospheric and magnetospheric currents, as well as associated induced currents. The separation of these three sources is mathematically underdetermined using either ground or satellite measurements alone, but becomes tractable when the two data sets are combined. Based on this concept, we developed a new geomagnetic field modelling approach that allows us to simultaneously characterize the mid-latitude ionospheric, magnetospheric and the internal induced magnetic fields using ground and satellite observations for all local times and magnetic conditions, and without prescribing any harmonic behaviour on these current systems in time, as is typical in other models. By applying this new method to a 10-yr data set of ground observatory and multisatellite measurements from 2014 to 2023, we obtained the time-series of the spherical harmonic coefficients of the ionospheric, magnetospheric and induced fields. These new time-series allow the study of complex non-periodic dynamics of the external magnetic fields during global geomagnetic storms, as well as periodicities in the magnetospheric coefficients linked to solar activities and periodic ionospheric magnetic fields linked to lunar daily variations, contributing to a more complete picture of the dynamics of the external currents and magnetosphere–ionosphere interactions, and facilitating more accurate space weather nowcast and forecast. Finally, the new approach allows for a better characterization of internal induced field sources, leading to higher quality electromagnetic transfer functions.

This work is a collaboration with Dr. Alexander Grayver (University of Cologne).

Fourier spectrum of the magnetospheric magnetic field.
Fourier spectrum of the ionospheric magnetic field within diurnal band.
Snapshots of ionospheric equivalent sheet current (indicated by arrows) and streamfunction (color mesh).


Resources

  • [Open dataset] Min, J., & Grayver, A. (2025). A decade of the fast-varying ionospheric and magnetospheric magnetic fields from ground and multi-satellite observations (2014-2023) (1.0.0) Data set. Zenodo.


Published work