A combined analysis of geomagnetic data and cosmic ray secondaries in the September 2017 space weather phenomena studies

Abstract. The September 2017 solar flares and the subsequent geomagnetic storms driven by the coronal mass ejections were recognized as the ones of the most powerful space weather events during the current solar cycle. The occurrence of the most powerful solar flares and magnetic storms during the declining phase of a solar cycle (including the current 24th cycle) is a well-known phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to better characterize these events by applying the generalized characteristic function approach for combined analysis of geomagnetic activity indices, total electron content data and secondary cosmic ray data from the muon hodoscope that contained Forbush decreases resulting from solar plasma impacts. The main advantage of this approach is the possibility of identification of low-amplitude specific features in the analyzed data sets, using data from several environmental sources. The data sets for the storm period on September 6–11, 2017, were standardized in a unified way to construct the generalized characteristic function representing the overall dynamics of the data sequence. The new developed technique can help to study various space weather effects and obtain new mutually supportive information on different phases of geomagnetic storm evolution, based on the geomagnetic and other environmental observations in the near-terrestrial space.