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DMSP Poynting Flux: Data Processing and Inter-spacecraft Comparisons
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  • Liam Kilcommons,
  • Delores J. Knipp,
  • Marc R. Hairston,
  • W. Robin Coley
Liam Kilcommons
University of Colorado Boulder

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Delores J. Knipp
University of Colorado Boulder
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Marc R. Hairston
University of Texas at Dallas
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W. Robin Coley
University of Texas at Dallas
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Abstract

Poynting flux calculated from LEO spacecraft in-situ ion drift and magnetic field measurements is an important measure of energy exchange between the magnetosphere and ionosphere. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) spacecraft provide an extensive back-catalog of ion drift and magnetic perturbation measurements, from which quasi-steady Poynting flux could be calculated. However, since DMSP are operations-focused spacecraft, data must be carefully preprocessed for research use. We describe an automated approach for calculating earthward Poynting flux focusing on pre-processing and quality control. We produce a Poynting flux dataset using 9 satellite-years of DMSP F15, F16 and F18 observations. To validate our process we inter-compare Poynting flux from different spacecraft using more than 2000 magnetic conjunction events. We find no serious systematic differences. We further describe and apply an equal-area binning technique to obtain average spatial patterns of Poynting flux, magnetic perturbation, electric field and ion drift velocity. We perform our analysis using all components of electric and magnetic field and comment on the adverse consequences of the typical single-electric-field-component DMSP Poynting flux approximation on inter-spacecraft agreement. Including full-field components significantly increases the relative strength of near-cusp Poynting flux and increases the integrated high-latitude Poynting flux by ~25%