Calibration and Cleaning of Magnetic Satellite Data

The geomagnetic field is a fundamental and very useful property of the Earth, both in practical terms (for navigation, industrial applications and resource exploration) and in academic terms, for what it can tell us about various parts of the Earth - particularly the evolution of Earth's core, the structure of the Earth's crust and history of global tectonics, and also the motion of the oceans. It is also a major component in our protection from harmful space radiation. In order to use and understand the field, a first step is to produce mathematical models of it. The best models are made using data from low-Earth orbiting satellites; a particular new opportunity is about to become available with the launch of the European Space Agency mission Swarm, a dedicated magnetic measurement mission consisting of three satellites flying in a particular configuration optimised to tell us about the field. The majority of the geomagnetic field comes from within the Earth, but sources above the Earth also make a contribution - this is 'noise' when trying to model the main field of the Earth. In this project, we will develop new methodologies of better dealing with this noise, so as to use data from Swarm to produce more accurate and higher resolution models of the geomagnetic field.