Evaluation of candidate models for the 13th generation International Geomagnetic Reference Field

Abstract

In December 2019, the 13th revision of the International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) was released by the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) Division V Working Group V-MOD. This revision comprises two new spherical harmonic main field models for epochs 2015.0 (DGRF-2015) and 2020.0 (IGRF-2020) and a model of the predicted secular variation for the interval 2020.0 to 2025.0 (SV-2020-2025). The models were produced from candidates submitted by fifteen international teams. These teams were led by the British Geological Survey (UK), China Earthquake Administration (China), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), University of Colorado Boulder (USA), Technical University of Denmark (Denmark), GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences (Germany), Institut de physique du globe de Paris (France), Institut des Sciences de la Terre (France), Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation (Russia), Kyoto University (Japan), University of Leeds (UK), Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (Germany), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (USA), University of Potsdam (Germany), and Universit\'e de Strasbourg (France). The candidate models were evaluated individually and compared to all other candidates as well to the mean, median and a robust Huber-weighted model of all candidates. These analyses were used to identify, for example, the variation between the Gauss coefficients or the geographical regions where the candidate models strongly differed. The majority of candidates were sufficiently close that the differences can be explained primarily by individual modeling methodologies and data selection strategies. None of the candidates were so different as to warrant their exclusion from the final IGRF-13. The IAGA V-MOD task force thus voted for two approaches: the median of the Gauss coefficients of the candidates for the DGRF-2015 and IGRF-2020 models and the robust Huber-weighted model for the predictive SV-2020-2025. In this paper, we document the evaluation of the candidate models and provide details of the approach used to derive the final IGRF-13 products. We also perform a retrospective analysis of the IGRF-12 SV candidates over their performance period (2015-2020). Our findings suggest that forecasting secular variation can benefit from combining physics-based core modeling with satellite observations.

The inter-hemispheric asymmetry during June-December storms and the anomalous peak formation: Role of possible anti-seasonal winds

“…But manuscript submitted to Space Weather equally dominant thermospheric affects are set up by the joule heating at higher latitude which reaches low latitude with some time lag (Blanc and Richmond, 1980;Fuller-Rowell et al, 1994). The two hemispheres can be affected by the solar inputs unevenly as in the case of St.Patrick's day storm of 17 March 2013 and 2015 (Kalita et al, 2016).The offset of the magnetic poles from the geographic poles, and, the offset of geographic and geomagnetic equators in most longitudes (Alken at al., 2021), can result in asymmetric thermospheric surges from the pole to the equator in the two hemispheres. This is due to the fact that the neutral are closely coupled to the ionospheric plasma which is constrained to move along field lines only.…”

Hydrogeophysical and hydrogeochemical characterization of volcanic aquifers in Northwest Ethiopia

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