HR: 1330h
AN: SM42A-0593    [PDF]
TI: Estimation of field aligned currents from combined Iridium, DMSP, Oersted and CHAMP Data.
AU: * Waters, C L
EM: colin.waters@newcastle.edu.au
AF: School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, The University of Newcastle, University Drive, Newcastle, NSW 2308 Australia
AU: Anderson, B J
EM: brian.anderson@jhuapl.edu
AF: The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723-6099 United States
AU: Christiansen, F
EM: fch@dmi.dk
AF: Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division, Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyve, 100 DK-2100, Copenhagen,, DK 2100 Denmark
AB: The Iridium system consists of more than 70 satellites in circular, polar, 780 km altitude orbits in six equally spaced planes. This configuration provides a unique opportunity to obtain in-situ measurements of the global distribution of field aligned currents and associated magnetic perturbations on time scales of the order of about an hour. The technique uses the cross track components of the magnetic field measurements from the Iridium satellites and makes no assumptions regarding ionospheric conductivity or global magnetic activity parameters (e.g., AE, Kp or Dst). The availability of magnetometer data from Oersted, CHAMP and DMSP, spacecraft allows (i) a direct test of the Iridium fitting results and (ii) estimation of field aligned currents using the combined data sets. In this paper we describe the method used to combine the Iridium data with higher quality, vector magnetometer data from DMSP, Oersted and CHAMP. The combined data sets are used to investigate the field aligned current configurations for various IMF and solar wind conditions.
DE: 2194 Instruments and techniques
DE: 2708 Current systems (2409)
DE: 2784 Solar wind/magnetosphere interactions
SC: SPA - Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting