Global characteristics of Pc1 magnetic pulsations during solar cycle 23 deduced from CHAMP data

We present a global climatology of Pc1 pulsations as observed by the CHAMP satellite from 2000 to 2010. The Pc1 center frequency and bandwidth are about 1 and 0.5 Hz, respectively. The ellipticity is mostly linear with the major axis almost aligned with the magnetic zonal direction. The diurnal variation of Pc1 occurrences shows a primary maximum early in the morning and a secondary maximum during pre-midnight hours. The annual variations of the occurrence rates exhibit a clear preference for local summer. The solar cycle dependence of the occurrence rate reveals a maximum at the declining phase (2004–2005). Neither magnetic activity nor solar wind velocity controls the Pc1 occurrence rate significantly. Pc1 occurrence rate peaks at subauroral latitudes, but the steep cutoff towards higher latitudes is due to auroral field-aligned currents masking the Pc1 pulsations. The center frequency of Pc1 pulsations does not show a clear dependence on latitude. The global distribution of Pc1 exhibits highest occurrence rates near the longitude sector of the South Atlantic Anomaly. Pc1 events at auroral latitudes, although they are rarely detected, show a clear occurrence peak around local noon. A majority of the auroral Pc1 events are observed during solar minimum years.

The possible statistical relation of Pc1 pulsations to Earthquake occurrence at low latitudes

We examine the association between earthquakes and Pc1 pulsations observed at a low-latitude station in Parkfield, California. The period under examination is ~7.5 years in total, from February 1999 to July 2006, and we use an automatic identification algorithm to extract information on Pc1 pulsations from the magnetometer data. These pulsations are then statistically correlated to earthquakes from the USGS NEIC catalog within a radius of 200 km around the magnetometer, and M>3.0. Results indicate that there is an enhanced occurrence probability of Pc1 pulsations ~5–15 days in advance of the earthquakes, during the daytime. We quantify the statistical significance and show that such an enhancement is unlikely to have occurred due to chance alone. We then examine the effect of declustering our earthquake catalog, and show that even though significance decreases, there is still a statistically significant daytime enhancement prior to the earthquakes. Finally, we select only daytime Pc1 pulsations as the fiducial time of our analysis, and show that earthquakes are ~3–5 times more likely to occur in the week following these pulsations, than normal. Comparing these results to other events, it is preliminarily shown that the normal earthquake probability is unaffected by geomagnetic activity, or a random event sequence.