GP43B-07:
Sensing the Electrical Conductivity of the Upper Mantle and Lithosphere Using Satellite Magnetic Signal Due to Ocean Tidal Flow
Thursday, 18 December 2014: 3:25 PM
Alexey V Kuvshinov, ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, Neesha R Schnepf, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States, Terence J Sabaka, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory, Greenbelt, MD, United States and Nils Olsen, Technical University of Denmark - Space, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
Abstract:
A few scientific groups convincingly demonstrated that the magnetic fields induced by the lunar semidiurnal (M2) ocean flow can be identified in magnetic satellite observations. These results support the idea to recover M2 magnetic signals from Swarm data, and to use these data for constraining lithosphere and upper mantle electrical conductivity in oceanic regions. Induction studies using ionospheric and magnetospheric primary sources with periods of about one day are sensitive to mantle conductivity at a few hundred kilometers depth because of the inductive coupling between primary and induced sources. In contrast, using oceanic tides as a signal allows studying shallower regions since the coupling is galvanic. This corresponds to global electric sounding. In this study we perform global 3-D EM numerical simulations in order to investigate the sensitivity of M2 signals to conductivity distributions at different depths. The results of sensitivity analysis are discussed, and comparison of the modelled M2 signals with those recovered by Comprehensive Inversion from one year of Swarm data is presented.
