Science Opportunities from Swarm Cluster Synergies
Stolle, Claudia1; Amm, Olaf2; Kauristie, Kirsti2; Vanhamäki, Heikki2; Partamies, Noora2; Christiansen, Freddy1; Buchert, Stephan, C.3; Opgenoorth, Hermann, J.3; Dunlop, Malcom4; Pitout, Frederic5; Ritter, Patricia6; Haagmans, Roger7; Taylor, Matthew G.G.T.7
1DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark, DENMARK; 2FMI Helsinki, FINLAND; 3IRF Upsala, SWEDEN; 4RAL Didcot, UNITED KINGDOM; 5IRAP, Toulouse, FRANCE; 6Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, German Research Centre for Geosciences, GFZ, GERMANY; 7ESTEC, NETHERLANDS

The upcoming ESA Swarm constellation mission, consisting of three spacecraft in the Earth's ionosphere together with the four-spacecraft ESA Cluster mission in the magnetosphere, provides a number of exiting new science opportunities for ionospheric physics and magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling studies. The magnetic and electric field measurements from the Swarm mission allow obtaining spatial maps of ionospheric currents, convection, and conductances along a strip that envelopes the orbits of the two lower closeby traveling satellites. The novel technique for calculating these properties from the Swarm data is based on Spherical Elementary Current (Vector) Systems (SECS), and will be presented together with first synthetic application examples. Using these results together with Cluster measurements of field-aligned currents will allow to empirically estimate the ionosphere-magnetosphere coupling factor K, as defined by the Knight relation.

Further examples from the multitude of science opportunities from Swarm and combined with ground-based instruments or satellites like Cluster, include amongst others studies of the Poynting flux between the magnetosphere and ionosphere and its contribution to thermospheric heating and upwelling, comparison of near Earth magnetic field with in-situ ring current magnetic field measurements, and examination of the field-aligned current closure between ionospheric region 2 currents and the magnetospheric ring current.