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From Observatories: Kiruna, Sweden

The Kp Index is an averaging of data from 9 observatories. But what does the data from a single observatory look like and what does it tell you? The real-time data from Kiruna, Sweden is the easiest to work with so we will start there! When you get Kiruna data, you will see a magnetogram something like this:

The horizontal axis is the Universal Time (UT) of the observation and the readings get updated every few minutes.

This sample graph (above) from May 30, 2003 shows that there was a disturbance late on May 29 and another began about 1200 UT to 1400 UT and became moderately strong around 1700UT.

Unlike temperature, which can be measured by a single number, magnetic fields have to be measured with three numbers - one for each direction in space - north-south, east-west and up-down. This plot shows the three components of the Earth's magnetic field measured at Kiruna. These plots show the X, Y and Z components of the magnetic field that indicate the strength of this field in the north-south (X), east-west (Y) and up-down (Z) directions.

The components are shown in three colors. The X-component is plotted in black, the Y-component is plotted in red, and the Z-component is plotted in green. The vertical axis indicates the strength of the particular magnetic field component. The units used are nano-Teslas (nT), which is a unit of magnetic strength used by scientists. A typical toy magnet has a strength of a million nano-Teslas!

This graph is very much like the graph you could make from your own soda bottle magnetometer. This graph only shows the Deflection of the magnetic field. The deflection is how much the field changes from the average or normal magnetic field at this location. To make this plot, the scientists subtracted the Earth's average field, and are only plotting how Earth's field has changed from this average level. This makes it very easy to see a stormy condition. With no storm in progress, the curves should all be near zero on the scale. If you see a sudden, large change (either negative or positive) by more than 100 nano-Teslas, then a storm is probably in progress.

Next Step: Baker Lake, Canada »

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