HMC Index

Cite as:

Pick, Leonie; Korte, Monika (2018): HMC Index. V. 1.0. GFZ Data Services. https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.2.3.2018.006

Status

I N R E V I E W : Pick, Leonie; Korte, Monika (2018): HMC Index. V. 1.0. GFZ Data Services. https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.2.3.2018.006

Abstract

The HMC (Hourly Magnetospheric Currents) index measures the activity of large-scale magnetospheric currents on Earth's surface from 1900 to 2015. It resolves the absolute intensity of low-frequency variations, especially at periods relevant to the solar cycle, more robustly than existing geomagnetic indices. HMC is based on hourly means of vector magnetic field measurements from 34 mid latitude geomagnetic observatories obtained from WDC Edinburgh (http://www.wdc.bgs.ac.uk/catalog/master.html). This data has been manually revised to correct for spikes, jumps and drifts. A detailed description of the derivation method is given in Pick et al. (JGR, 2019) to which these data are supplementary material.

This directory contains the HMC index (hmc1900phor.hor) and the modified observatory data that it is based on (data.zip). The index and the observatory data files are formatted in compliance with the IAGA-2002 ASCII exchange format (https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/IAGA/vdat/IAGA2002/iaga2002format.html).

Individual file names are composed of:
[IAGA code of observatory] + [first active year during 1900-2015] + [p(provisional)] + [hor(hourly)] + [_mod(modified)].hor

Also included is information on how the data modifications (list in modifications.pdf) were applied (readme.txt).