Dynamical characteristics of magnetospheric energetic ion time series: evidence for low dimensional chaos

Abstract. This paper is a companion to the first work (Pavlos et al., 2003), which contains significant results concerning the dynamical characteristics of the magnetospheric energetic ions’ time series. The low dimensional and nonlinear deterministic characteristics of the same time series were described in Pavlos et al. (2003). In this second work we present significant results concerning the Lyapunov spectrum, the mutual information and prediction models. The dynamical characteristics of the magnetospheric ions’ signals are compared with corresponding characteristics obtained for the stochastic Lorenz system when a coloured noise perturbation is present. In addition, the null hypothesis is tested for the dynamical characteristics of the magnetospheric ions’ signal by using nonlinear surrogate data. The results of the above comparisons provide significant evidence for the existence of low dimensional chaotic dynamics underlying the energetic ions’ time series.

Key words. Magnetospheric physics (energetic particles) – Radio sciences (nonlinear phenomena)