The nature and origins of the day-to-day variability in Earth’s surface magnetic field

Abstract

Numerical experiments are performed with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIE-GCM) to reveal the characteristics and origins of daytime magnetic field variations on the ground (ΔB) at planetary-wave (PW) periods (2–20 days). Simulations are performed to separate the responses to forcing in the lower atmosphere from solar-magnetospheric forcing. Lower-atmosphere forcing is specified at the 97-km lower boundary of the TIE-GCM by NCAR's Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIME-GCM), which itself is forced at 30 km by MERRA (Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications) outputs. Solar and magnetospheric inputs to the TIE-GCM are specified according to parameterizations based on F10.7 and Kp. The study focuses on latitudes 0°–65°N during October 1–31, 2009, when F10.7 (range 68–80), Kp (range 0–4), and Ap (range 0–13) are typical of quiet-time “weather”. Neutral dynamics in the dynamo region (ca. 100–150 km) during this period is dominated by winds due to PW modulated tides, where the PW include the quasi-6, 10 and 16-day westward-propagating normal modes with zonal wavenumber s = 1, and eastward-propagating ultra-fast Kelvin waves (UFKW) with s = −1 and periods between 2 and 5 days.Results and conclusions are as follows. PW-period perturbations in daytime ΔB at the ground are dominated by variability originating in the lower atmosphere. The only exception is the 45°–65° latitude regime around noon, where the ΔB variability due to lower atmospheric forcing exceeds that due to solar-magnetospheric forcing by only about 50%. Broadband zonally-symmetric oscillations also occur in ΔB due to dissipation of the tidal spectrum at PW periods in the E-region. These results raise the possibility that some level of contamination from the lower atmosphere may exist in magnetic indices such as ap, Kp, and Ap that are used as measures solar-magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling strength, under levels of geomagnetic activity similar to that characterizing October 2009. It is also found that variations in conductivities play a minor role compared with neutral winds in producing PW-period variations in ΔB, and that there is not a robust one-to-one correspondence between spectral peaks in ΔB and those in the neutral winds. Several factors contribute to this latter result, which are explained in the text.