Recent geomagnetic variations and the force balance in Earth’s core

Abstract

SUMMARY The nature of the force balance that governs the geodynamo is debated. Recent theoretical analyses and numerical simulations support a quasigeotrophic (QG), magneto-Archimedes-Coriolis (MAC) balance in Earth’s core, where the Coriolis and pressure forces equilibrate at leading order in amplitude, and where the buoyancy, Lorentz and ageostrophic Coriolis forces equilibrate at the next order. In contrast, earlier theoretical expectations have favoured a magnetostrophic regime where the Lorentz force would reach leading order at the system scale. The dominant driver (buoyant or magnetic) for the general circulation in Earth’s core is equally debated. In this study, these questions are explored in the light of the high-quality geomagnetic data recently acquired by satellites and at magnetic ground observatories. The analysis involves inverse geodynamo modelling, a method that uses multivariate statistics extracted from a numerical geodynamo model to infer the state of Earth’s core from a geomagnetic field model interpretation of the main field and secular variation data. To test the QG-MAC dynamic hypothesis against the data, the framework is extended in order to explicitly prescribe this force balance into the inverse problem solved at the core surface. The resulting inverse solutions achieve a quantitatively adequate fit to the data while ensuring deviations from the QG-MAC balance (which amount to an inertial driving of the flow) lower than each of the leading forces. The general circulation imaged within the core over the past two decades confirms the existence of a planetary-scale, eccentric, axially columnar gyre that comprises an intense, equatorially symmetric jet at high latitudes in the Pacific hemisphere. The dominant driver of this circulation is shown to be of buoyant nature, through a thermal wind balance with a longitudinally hemispheric buoyancy anomaly distribution. Geomagnetic forecasts initiated with the inverted core states are systematically more accurate against the true interannual geomagnetic field evolution when enforcing the QG-MAC constraint. This force balance is therefore consistent with the geomagnetic data at the large scales of Earth’s core that can be imaged by the method.