Abstract
Abstract. Multi-satellite missions like Cluster allow to study the full spatio-temporal variability of plasma processes in near-Earth space, and both the frequency and the wave vector dependence of dispersion relations can be reconstructed. Existing wave analysis methods include high-resolution beamformers like the wave telescope or k-filtering technique, and the phase differencing approach that combines the correlations measured at pairs of sensors of the spacecraft array. In this paper, we make use of the eigendecomposition of the cross spectral density matrix to construct a direct wave identification method that we choose to call the wave surveyor technique. The analysis scheme extracts only the dominant wave mode but is much faster to apply than existing techniques, hence it is expected to ease survey-type detection of waves in large data sets. The wave surveyor technique is demonstrated by means of synthetic data, and is also applied to Cluster magnetometer measurements.
Highlights
Near-Earth space is a dynamic plasma environment that creates and supports wave activity on a broad range of temporal and spatial scales
Existing wave analysis methods include high-resolution beamformers like the wave telescope or k-filtering technique, and the phase differencing approach that combines the correlations measured at pairs of sensors of the spacecraft array
We demonstrate the wave surveyor technique by means of a synthetic model signal composed of two plane waves and isotropic noise: B(r, t) = AnWTn,τn (t − tn) + ν N (r, t)
Summary
Near-Earth space is a dynamic plasma environment that creates and supports wave activity on a broad range of temporal and spatial scales. Phase differencing schemes require peak finding in spectral cross correlation measures between various pairs of sensors in the array. Such search procedures can be quite time-consuming and ambiguous in some cases. The method works only for the dominant wave mode whereas minimum variance estimators and phase differencing techniques can in principle identify a number of different modes. The wave surveyor technique makes use of the eigendecomposition of the cross spectral density (CSD) matrix that plays a key role in the so-called multiple signal classification (MUSIC) scheme (Schmidt, 1979, 1981).
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