Publication Date:
2014-04-30
Description:
The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) launches and maintains a network of satellites to monitor the meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-terrestrial physics environments. In the past decade, geomagnetic field modelers have focused much attention on magnetic measurements from missions such as CHAMP, Ørsted and SAC-C. With the completion of the CHAMP mission in 2010, there has been a multi-year gap in satellite-based vector magnetic field measurements available for main field modeling. In this study, we calibrate the Special Sensor Magnetometer (SSM) instrument onboard DMSP to create a dataset suitable for main field modeling. These vector field measurements are calibrated to compute instrument timing shifts, scale factors, offsets, and non-orthogonality angles of the fluxgate magnetometer cores. Euler angles are then computed to determine the orientation of the vector magnetometer with respect to a local coordinate system. We fit a degree 15 main field model to the dataset and compare with the World Magnetic Model (WMM) and Ørsted scalar measurements. We call this model DMSP-MAG-1 and its coefficients and software are available for download at http://geomag.org/models/dmsp.html . Our results indicate that the DMSP dataset will be a valuable source for main field modeling for the years between CHAMP and the recently launched Swarm mission.
Print ISSN:
0148-0227
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics
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