The second generation of the GFZ Reference Internal Magnetic Model: GRIMM-2

Abstract

We present the second generation of the GFZ Reference Internal Magnetic Model (GRIMM-2), that was derived for the preparation of the GFZ candidate for the 11th generation of the IGRF. The model is built by fitting a vector data set made of CHAMP satellite and observatory data, spanning the period 2001.0 to 2009.5. The data selection technique and the model parametrization are similar to that used for the derivation of the GRIMM model (Lesur et al., 2008). The obtained model is robust over the time span of the data. However, the secular variation above spherical harmonic degree 13 becomes less controlled by the data and is constrained by the applied regularization before 2002 and after 2008.5. At best, only the spherical harmonic degrees 3 to 6 are robustly estimated for the secular acceleration. The problem associated with the first two spherical harmonic degrees of the secular acceleration model arise from the difficulty in separating the core field signal from the external fields and their internally induced counterparts. The regularization technique applied smoothes the magnetic field model in time. This affects all spherical harmonic degrees, but starts to be significant at spherical harmonic degree 5.