Determining field-aligned currents with the Swarm constellation mission

By P. Ritter, Hermann Lühr, J. Rauberg. Earth, Planets and Space, 2013

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Field-aligned currents (FAC) are the prime mechanism for coupling energy from the solar wind into the upper atmosphere at high latitudes. Knowing their intensity and distribution is of pivotal importance for the selection of quiet time data at high latitudes to be used in main field analysis. At the same time FACs can be regarded as a key element for studies of magnetosphere-ionosphere interactions. The Swarm satellite constellation, in particular the lower pair, provides the opportunity to determine radial currents uniquely. The computation of FACs from the vector magnetic field data is a straightforward and fast process, applying Ampère’s integral law to a set of four magnetic field values. In this method the horizontal magnetic field components at a quad of measurement points sampled by the two satellites moving side-by-side are interpreted. The presented algorithm was implemented as described here in the Swarm Level-2 processing facility to provide the automatically estimated radial and field-aligned currents. It was tested with synthetic data in the Swarm Level-1b format. The resulting currents agree excellently with the input currents of the synthetic model. The data products are computed along the entire orbits. In addition, the L2 processor calculates also FACs with a 1 Hz time resolution individually from the three single Swarm satellites.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6b4858323a1863c1f350ff558fb207c0cc71719

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Hermann Lühr
2. J. Gjerloev
3. P. Newell
4. Astrid Maute
5. Eelco Doornbos
6. Y. Yamazaki

In Molecular Biology

1. Hermann Lühr
2. J. Rauberg
3. Ingo Michaelis
4. J. Gjerloev
5. Y. Yamazaki
6. Astrid Maute
7. Eelco Doornbos

Citations in the corpus

• Field‐aligned currents' scale analysis performed with the Swarm constellation (2014, background): “More details on equation (2) can be found in Ritter et al. [2013]. This equation assumes, as usual, FAC current sheets are perpendicular to the flight direction.”