Concerning long-term geomagnetic variations and space climatology

Abstract

Abstract. During geomagnetic polarity transitions the surface magnetic field of the Earth decays to about 25% and less of its present value. This implies a shrinking of the terrestrial magnetosphere and posses the question of whether magnetospheric magnetic field variations scale in the same manner. Furthermore, the geomagnetic main field also controls the magnetospheric magnetic field and space weather conditions. Long-term geomagnetic variations are thus intimately related to space climate. We critically assess existing scaling relations and derive new ones for various magnetospheric parameters. For example, we find that ring current perturbations do not increase with decreasing dipole moment. And we derive a scaling relation for the polar electrojet contribution, indicating a weak increase with increasing internal field. From this we infer that the ratio between external and internal field contributions may be weakly enhanced during polarity transitions. Our scaling relations also provide more insight on the importance of the internal geomagnetic field contribution for space climate.