Use of the L1 Constellation as a Multispacecraft Solar Wind Monitor

摘要

A novel multispacecraft solar wind monitor is developed, which expands on the forecasting ability of OMNI by giving spatially resolved predictions. The prediction algorithm ingests all the data from the current fleet of three L1 monitors, allowing gradients in the solar wind to be resolved on scale sizes similar to the magnetosphere. Understanding structure of the solar wind is vital to determine the global magnetospheric configuration, which is important in both real time as a space-weather product and data users wanting to know upstream conditions when interpreting observations. The model is validated by comparing the predictions with other spacecraft observing the solar wind in situ. We perform a statistical study with thousands of hours of magnetospheric multiscale observations in the solar wind, comparing the prediction accuracy of the multispacecraft monitor to all of the OMNIWeb single-spacecraft monitors. The multispacecraft monitor shows improvement over all three of the single-spacecraft predictions for 44% of the cases and also outperforms both ACE and Wind, which are the primary magnetic field contributors to the OMNI IMF prediction, 55% of the time. We propose that the realistic structure of the solar wind that is resolved with multiple solar wind monitors could be vitally important to implement as upstream conditions in global magnetospheric simulations.