The Time-Frequency Analysis (TFA) toolbox: a versatile processing tool for the recognition of magnetospheric and ionospheric signals in Swarm time series

The ongoing Swarm mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) provides an opportunity for a better knowledge of the near-Earth electromagnetic environment, including investigations of ultra-low frequency (ULF) wave events. The Time-Frequency Analysis (TFA) tool is a processing tool established for deriving Pc1 (0.2–5 Hz) and Pc3 (20–100 mHz) wave indices. The tool includes both a graphical interface as well as a dedicated back-end that can be used to perform wavelet analysis and visualize the results for both Pc1 and Pc3 waves, using both Swarm magnetic Level 1b 50 Hz and 1 Hz data. Following recommendations from the Advisory Board of the Swarm Data, Innovation and Science Cluster (Swarm DISC) the tool has been further developed and generalized so as to accommodate analysis of other types of time series from both satellite and ground station measurements. In particular, the resulting TFA toolbox provides users with the capabilities of studying different wave types (e.g. compressional waves, Alfvén waves, etc.), various magnetic field components (e.g. in Mean Field Aligned – MFA coordinates), and other geophysical measurements (e.g. electric field, plasma parameters). The TFA toolbox is also able to detect external source signals, e.g. due to plasma instabilities, and artificial disturbances (anomalies), e.g. spikes, jumps. It is possible also to use data from ground stations in a consistent format, e.g. 1 Hz magnetic observatory data as available in the virtual research service - VirES for Swarm. Moreover, integration of the TFA toolbox into the VirES platform is currently under development. This presentation aims to demonstrate the unique capabilities of the Swarm DISC TFA toolbox.