Presenting geomagnetic activity to a general audience

[Montare, Aidan A. (Fed)]

Hi all! It’s been fun to follow the discussions of the recent geomagnetic storm in the mailing list. I’m looking at putting together a few plots to show the effect the Gannon storm had on some of our NIST experiments and services, and was hoping I could get some advice on how to present geomagnetic data to a general audience.

 

I was thinking about showing some NIST data alongside a graph of some kind of geomagnetic index, or maybe some periodic photos showing the aurora activity. Some naïve questions: Would something like the Kp index be appropriate to show, or is there a different measure that would be better? If anyone happens to have links to some plotting code for such things in python, that’d also be much appreciated. I’m open to any suggestions people might have.

 

Best wishes,

 

Aidan Montare (she/her)

Time Realization and Distribution Group

Time and Frequency Division

NIST Boulder

 

[Phil Erickson]

Hi Aidan,

  It's a bit tricky.  One of the best storm indicators is Dst:

https://wdc.kugi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dst_realtime/presentmonth/index.html

  but to understand it, you have to understand the presence of the inner magnetosphere's ring current (as that's the circulating current that is causing a magnetic field depression at the equator), which is tough to grasp for a general audience.  Maybe Kp is a little better to use where it's described as a general indicator of magnetic disturbance over the planet.  I'm sure others on this list have better ideas than I do.

  Should you decide to stick with Kp, I would download the data from GFZ-Potsdam:

https://www.gfz-potsdam.de/en/section/geomagnetism/data-products-services/geomagnetic-kp-index

  and then plot it in your favorite tool.

Cheers

Phil

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[Terry Bullett]

Aidan,

Does the physics of the cold ion fountain clock experience any variance in the quantum processes (or any subsequent engineering system) due to changes in the ambient magnetic field strength?
The dB/dt does create currents and heating in any plasma.  

Also, as a WWV fan, under these past ionosphere conditions, I would suggest to re-consider any assumptions about no ionosphere gradients between Boulder and Ft. Collins.  

Perhaps these are not operationally relevant, but they are scientifically interesting.

From a former ionosonde guy....

Cheers,

Terry W0ASP
Berthoud, Colorado.     

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