2023/10/20 by Theodore Broeren, K. G. Klein, Broeren, T. +3
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Data Analysis #FOS: Physical sciences #Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping #Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism Studies #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph) #Space Physics (physics.space-ph) #Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.15187
openalex publication_date 2023/10/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Space plasma studies frequently use in situ magnetic field measurements taken from many spacecraft simultaneously. A useful data product of these measurements is the reconstructed magnetic field in a volume near the spacecraft observatory. We compare a standard method of computing the magnetic field at arbitrary spatial points, the Curlometer, to two novel approaches: a Radial Basis Function interpolation and a time-dependent 2D inverse distance weighted interpolation scheme called Timesync. These three methods, which only require in situ measurements of the magnetic fields and bulk plasma velocities at a sparse set of spatial points, are implemented on synthetic data drawn from a time-evolving numerical simulation of plasma turbulence. We compare both the topology of the reconstructed field to the ground truth of the simulation and the statistics of the fluctuations found in the reconstructed field to those from the simulated turbulence. We conclude that the Radial Basis Function and Timesync methods outperform the Curlometer in both the topological and statistical comparisons.