Ocean-generated magnetic field study based on satellite geomagnetic measurements: 2. Signal inference

The work presented here is the second part of an ocean‐generated magnetic field study and provides a procedure for inferring the ocean‐generated magnetic field from satellite geomagnetic measurements. The procedure was first tested on synthetic data. The simulation employed a hypothetical satellite measuring the magnetic field at an altitude of 400 km. The “measurements” (generated by the CM4 and CHAOS models) included the core field, the lithospheric field, the ionospheric and magnetospheric fields, the secular variation, and the ocean‐generated magnetic field. The search algorithm, as proposed in part 1, converts irregular measurements into fields on a regular grid. The filtration procedure is based on the Savitzky‐Golay algorithm. The procedure includes four steps providing seven unknown filter parameters. Parameter values were obtained by solving the problem of minimizing the spatially averaged squared residuals between the inferred field and the model field. Then, the parameters were used in the filter to infer the ocean‐generated magnetic field that was initially added to the “measurements.” The inferred signal, although spatially corrupted and having a smaller magnitude (60% of the magnitude of the initial signal), indicated the presence of magnetic anomalies within the Southern Ocean. The technique was then applied to CHAMP geomagnetic measurements. The result of filtering was clear magnetic anomalies within the Southern Ocean with a spatial character that were close to what models of the ocean‐generated magnetic field provided. The magnitude of the inferring signal was 5 nT, the corrected values were 7–8 nT, 1–2 nT larger than the modeled field magnitude. To compare the temporal variability of the inferred field with the variability of sea surface height, ten 10° by 10° areas were selected within the Southern Ocean and the root‐mean‐square of both SSH and the magnetic field were computed for each area. A comparison of the results indicated a close similarity between SSH and the magnetic field temporal variability, which allowed the identification of the inferred field as the ocean‐generated magnetic field. Key Points Ocean‐generated magnetic field inferred from data Varying in time magnetic anomalies are found in Southern Ocean Variability is close to the SSH temporal variability