Investigation of the occurrence of significant deviations in the magnetopause location: solar-wind and foreshock effects

Grimmich, Niklas; Pöppelwerth, Adrian; Archer, Martin Owain; Sibeck, David Gary; Plaschke, Ferdinand; Mo, Wenli; Toy-Edens, Vicki; Turner, Drew Lawson; Kim, Hyangpyo; Nakamura, Rumi

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-43-151-2025

Articles | Volume 43, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-43-151-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-43-151-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 43, issue 1

Regular paper

|

21 Feb 2025

Regular paper |

| 21 Feb 2025

Investigation of the occurrence of significant deviations in the magnetopause location: solar-wind and foreshock effects

Niklas Grimmich, Adrian Pöppelwerth, Martin Owain Archer, David Gary Sibeck, Ferdinand Plaschke, Wenli Mo, Vicki Toy-Edens, Drew Lawson Turner, Hyangpyo Kim, and Rumi Nakamura

Data sets

Database: Cluster Magnetopause Crossings between 2001 and 2020 Niklas Grimmich et al. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PXCTG

Database: THEMIS magnetopause crossings between 2007 and mid-2022 Niklas Grimmich et al. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/B6KUX

8 years of dayside magnetospheric multiscale (MMS) unsupervised clustering plasma regions classifications Vicki Toy-Edens et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10491877

OMNI dataset J. King and N. Papitashvili https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/data/omni/omni_cdaweb/

Geomagnetic Dst index M. Nose et al. http://wdc.kugi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/

Short summary

The boundary of Earth's magnetic field, the magnetopause, deflects and reacts to the solar wind, the energetic particles emanating from the Sun. We find that certain types of solar wind favour the occurrence of deviations between the magnetopause locations observed by spacecraft and those predicted by models. In addition, the turbulent region in front of the magnetopause, the foreshock, has a large influence on the location of the magnetopause and thus on the accuracy of the model predictions.