Ring Current Reconstruction via Multi-Satellite Observations and Comparison with VERB-4D Reanalysis Data

The Earth’s ring current is a complex dynamic system that plays an important role in geomagnetic storms. This ring-shaped current environment changes its structure and intensity on different time scales as a result from the incoming solar wind. Particle populations display very different behaviors, making it extremely hard to develop physics-based forecasting models for the ring current environment.

 

Satellite data provides electron point measurements that can be used to study the different physical processes occurring in the Earth’s magnetospheric ring current. However, in order to fully understand the particle dynamics and injection processes in this region, high temporal and spatial data resolutions are required. We attempt to tackle this issue by using a combination of electron-flux observations from different satellite missions and instruments, in order to improve the global resolution of this dynamic environment.

 

In this work, we present a global reconstruction of the ring current population (energies from 1to a few 100 keV) using global multi-satellite data from Arase, POES, GOES, THEMIS and the Van Allen Probes (RBSP) missions. We achieved this by intercalibrating the satellite data for the year 2017.

Additionally, we present a comparison of the observed electron flux environment with a re-analysis of the ring current region obtained by using  the simplified version of the VERB-4D, which solves the convection equation and reduces the problem to a two-dimensional case by using parameterized lifetimes. For the reanalysis, we assimilate GOES and Van Allen Probes (RBSP A and RBSP B) data with a Stardard Kalman Filter.