Investigation of geomagnetic induced current at high latitude during the storm-time variation

Falayi, E.O. and Ogunmodimu, O. and Bolaji, O.S. and Ayanda, J.D. and Ojoniyi, O.S. (2017) Investigation of geomagnetic induced current at high latitude during the storm-time variation. NRIAG Journal of Astronomy and Geophysics, 6 (1). pp. 131-140. ISSN 2090-9977

Abstract

During the geomagnetic disturbances, the geomagnetically induced current (GIC) are influenced by the geoelectric field flowing in conductive Earth. In this paper, we studied the variability of GICs, the time derivatives of the geomagnetic field (dB/dt), geomagnetic indices: Symmetric disturbance field in H (SYM-H) index, AU (eastward electrojet) and AL (westward electrojet) indices, Interplanetary parameters such as solar wind speed (v), and interplanetary magnetic field (Bz) during the geomagnetic storms on 31 March 2001, 21 October 2001, 6 November 2001, 29 October 2003, 31 October 2003 and 9 November 2004 with high solar wind speed due to a coronal mass ejection. Wavelet spectrum based approach was employed to analyze the GIC time series in a sequence of time scales of one to twenty four hours. It was observed that there are more concentration of power between the 14–24 h on 31 March 2001, 17–24 h on 21 October 2001, 1–7 h on 6 November 2001, two peaks were observed between 5–8 h and 21–24 h on 29 October 2003, 1–3 h on 31 October 2003 and 18–22 h on 9 November 2004. Bootstrap method was used to obtain regression correlations between the time derivative of the geomagnetic field (dB/dt) and the observed values of the geomagnetic induced current on 31 March 2001, 21 October 2001, 6 November 2001, 29 October 2003, 31 October 2003 and 9 November 2004 which shows a distributed cluster of correlation coefficients at around r = −0.567, −0.717, −0.477, −0.419, −0.210 and r = −0.488 respectively. We observed that high energy wavelet coefficient correlated well with bootstrap correlation, while low energy wavelet coefficient gives low bootstrap correlation. It was noticed that the geomagnetic storm has a influence on GIC and geomagnetic field derivatives (dB/dt). This might be ascribed to the coronal mass ejection with solar wind due to particle acceleration processes in the solar atmosphere.