Unraveling the Multi-Scale Solar Wind Structure Between Lagrange 1-point, Lunar Orbit and Earth’s Bow Shock: Better Space Weather Prediction Through Information Theory

The space weather effects at the Earth’s magnetosphere are mostly driven by the solar wind that carries the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF). The incoming solar wind properties at L1 are typically used for developing various space weather forecasts. In this presentation we use several years of data in the solar wind from lunar orbiting ARTEMIS spacecraft and MMS upstream Earth’s bow shock to study the multi-scale structure of the IMF as determined by the Wavelet analysis. We determine the lag times between different scales and their dependence on 1) solar wind plasma properties and 2) spacecraft positions. Many solar wind parameters are correlated and anticorrelated with one another. We test the concept of conditional mutual information to isolate the effect of a single parameter and the dependence of various solar wind parameters on the time lags to provide the best/worse correlations between different scales. This will aid in isolating solar wind conditions when single point measurements of the IMF at Lagrange 1 point will likely lead to compromised space weather prediction accuracy.