Empirical laws of plasmapause and plasmasphere outer edge location from the Van Allen Probes

This webpage provides access to empirical laws of the plasmapause position and the dense outer edge of the plasasphere position (i.e. location of the 100 #/cc electron density) established from spacecraft charging of the Van Allen Probes (RBSP), using data from Probe B from 26 September 2012 to 16 July 2019. These empirical laws are published of the following article:

Ripoll, J.-F., Thaller, S. A., Hartley, D. P., Cunningham, G. S., Pierrard, V., Kurth, W. S., et al. (2022). Statistics and empirical models of the plasmasphere boundaries from the Van Allen Probes for radiation belt physics. Geophysical Research Letters, 49, e2022GL101402. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL101402.

Please refer to the article and this link if you make any use of the data.

We first deliver 3 files which contain the plasmapause position versus a given geomagnetic index, either Kp, AE, or Dst. These data files are MLT-averaged. The filename is Lpp_v_XX_stats_1.txt with XX the index name.  

We then deliver 3 files which contains the plasmapause position versus a geomagnetic starred index (i.e. a max taken during the last 24 hours for Kp and AE and a min for Dst), either Kp*, AE*, or Dst* for 4 MLT sectors written successively in each file and then for all sectors averaged together. These data files are MLT-dependent for the 4 first blocks and then MLT-averaged in the fifth block. The filename is Lpp_v_XX_star_MLT_stats_2-1.txt with XX the starred index name. 

The MLT range is given in the last two columns. When the plasmapause location is undetermined (i.e. Lpp = 0 or no value), there is no MLT, so that in the file we just have the total number of points (all real) and not the three values of total, number of real, number of Nans.

Similarly, we deliver 3 files which contains the plasmapause position versus a geomagnetic non starred index, either Kp, AE, or Dst for 4 MLT sectors written successively in each file. Filenames have the form "Lpp_v_XX_MLT_stats_1.txt" with XX the name of the index. Figures associated to this data were not given in the article and have been added here with a filename of the form Lpp_by_mlt_XX.pdf with XX the name of the index.

Finally, the zip file "RBSP-A Figures and Laws" contains Figures (same format as each figure of Figure 4 in the article) and empirical laws (same format as above) for RBSP-A data (10/2012-04/2016). Being more limited in time, we rather recommend to use RBSP B data. They are provided to confirm both RBSP A and B data agree when statistics are converged.