“…In the century since Bartels' original deduction, a very large number of papers have discussed UT variations in the magnetosphere which, given that many magnetospheric processes take place in limited magnetic local time regions (in particular, substorm phenomena take place in the sector around local midnight), gives potential longitudinal variations in space weather and also means that the effects of a given disturbance in interplanetary space depend upon its time of arrival at Earth. UT variations have been reported in geomagnetic indices in a great many studies (Waldo-Lewis and McIntosh, 1953;McIntosh, 1959;Nicholson and Wulf, 1961;Davis and Sugiura, 1966;Berthelier, 1976;Aoki, 1977;Mayaud, 1978;Russell, 1989;Berthelier, 1990;Saroso et al, 1993;Takalo et al, 1995;de La Sayette and Berthelier, 1996;Siscoe and Crooker, 1996;Hajkowicz, 1998;Ahn et al, 2000;Cliver et al, 2000;Lyatsky et al, 2001;O'Brien and McPherron, 2002;Ahn and Moon, 2003;Karinen and Mursula, 2005;Wang and Lühr, 2007;Yakovchouk et al, 2012;Chu et al, 2015;Lockwood et al, 2020a;Lockwood et al, 2020b;Lockwood et al, 2020c;Balan et al, 2021;Lockwood et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2021). A problem for all these studies is that if the longitudinal distribution of magnetometer stations employed is not even, then a spurious UT variation is introduced into the geomagnetic data (Mayaud, 1978;Mayaud, 1980;Takalo and Mursula, 2001;Lockwood et al, 2019b).…”