Abstract. In a recent paper (Chian et al., 2016) it was shown that magnetic
reconnection at the interface region between two magnetic flux ropes
is responsible for the genesis of interplanetary intermittent
turbulence. The normalized third-order moment (skewness) and the
normalized fourth-order moment (kurtosis) display a quadratic
relation with a parabolic shape that is commonly observed in
observational data from turbulence in fluids and plasmas, and is
linked to non-Gaussian fluctuations due to coherent structures. In
this paper we perform a detailed study of the relation between the
skewness and the kurtosis of the modulus of the magnetic field
|B| during a triple interplanetary magnetic flux rope
event. In addition, we investigate the skewness–kurtosis relation of
two-point differences of |B| for the same event. The
parabolic relation displays scale dependence and is found to be
enhanced during magnetic reconnection, rendering support for the
generation of non-Gaussian coherent structures via rope–rope
magnetic reconnection. Our results also indicate that a direct
coupling between the scales of magnetic flux ropes and the scales
within the inertial subrange occurs in the solar wind. Keywords. Space plasma physics (turbulence)