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Abstract

The geomagnetism group of NCEI/CIRES, in partnership with their government and industry partners, develops and distributes magnetic field models of the Earth’s internal field for applications such as navigation and directional drilling - providing magnetic field values (total field, dip, and declination) at or near the Earth’s surface. A cloud-based real-time model improves the internal field models by modeling the magnetic fields originating in the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere and their induced secondary fields in real-time for low and mid-latitude regions. We evaluate the Weimer magnetic field model (Weimer, 2013), which is an empirical representation of high-latitude magnetic field variations driven by solar wind measurements at Sun-Earth L1, as a potential candidate for modeling the magnetic field variations in the high-latitude regions. We use observatory data from the INTERMAGNET and SuperMAG networks to compare the predicted Weimer magnetic variations to the observed variations on the ground. We find that the Weimer model reduces the high-latitude standard deviations by ~30% when daily baselines are subtracted from the data. We also compare the Weimer performance to the University of Michigan’s Geospace model during selected geomagnetic storms.