Engineering Commons^™

Reconstruction Of Two-Dimensional Magnetopause Structures From Cluster Observations: Verification Of Method, H. Hasegawa, B. U. Ö Sonnerup, M. W. Dunlop, A. Balogh, S. E. Haaland, B. Klecker, G. Paschmann, B. Lavraud, I. Dandouras, H. Reme

Dartmouth Scholarship

A recently developed technique for reconstructing approximately two-dimensional (∂/∂z≈0), time-stationary magnetic field structures in space is applied to two magnetopause traversals on the dawnside flank by the four Cluster spacecraft, when the spacecraft separation was about 2000km. The method consists of solving the Grad-Shafranov equation for magnetohydrostatic structures, using plasma and magnetic field data measured along a single spacecraft trajectory as spatial initial values. We assess the usefulness of this single-spacecraft-based technique by comparing the magnetic field maps produced from one spacecraft with the field vectors that other spacecraft actually observed. For an optimally selected invariant (z)-axis, the correlation between …