Modelling the Earth’s core magnetic field under flow constraints

Abstract

Two recent magnetic field models, GRIMM and xCHAOS, describe core field accelerations with similar behavior up to Spherical Harmonic (SH) degree 5, but which differ significantly for higher degrees. These discrepancies, due to different approaches in smoothing rapid time variations of the core field, have strong implications for the interpretation of the secular variation. Furthermore, the amount of smoothing applied to the highest SH degrees is essentially the modeler’s choice. We therefore investigate new ways of regularizing core magnetic field models. Here we propose to constrain field models to be consistent with the frozen flux induction equation by co-estimating a core magnetic field model and a flow model at the top of the outer core. The flow model is required to have smooth spatial and temporal behavior. The implementation of such constraints and their effects on a magnetic field model built from one year of CHAMP satellite and observatory data, are presented. In particular, it is shown that the chosen constraints are efficient and can be used to build reliable core magnetic field secular variation and acceleration model components.