Is there a strange attractor in the magnetosphere
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD (United States)
This paper reviews recent attempts to determine if some aspects of magnetospheric dynamics, and in particular substorms as measured by AE and AL geomagnetic indices, can be represented by a low-dimensional dynamical system. If true, this result would imply that a small set of ordinary differential equations could describe important aspects of substorm dynamics, greatly simplifying modeling and prediction efforts and providing significant input to more detailed modeling. The embedding and correlation dimension methods used to investigate the dimensionality of a physical process from a single time series are considered in detail with an emphasis on what can go wrong and what can be done about it. Two main conclusions of this work, which includes some new results on the particular case of AL, are (1) that a low-dimensional and probably strange attractor does exist in magnetospheric dynamics, and (2) that there is no reliable substitute for using large numbers of data points in performing analyses leading to this conclusion.
- OSTI ID:
- 5254656
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Geophysical Research; (United States), Journal Name: Journal of Geophysical Research; (United States) Vol. 96:A9; ISSN 0148-0227; ISSN JGREA
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Statistical properties of chaotic dynamical systems which exhibit strange attractors
Strange Attractors in Drift Wave Turbulence
Related Subjects
Ionospheric
& Magetospheric Phenomena
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
ATTRACTORS
BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
DATA ANALYSIS
DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
DYNAMICS
EARTH ATMOSPHERE
EARTH MAGNETOSPHERE
EQUATIONS
FLUID MECHANICS
HYDRODYNAMICS
MAGNETIC BAYS
MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMICS
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
MATHEMATICAL SPACE
MECHANICS
PHASE SPACE
SPACE