The CHAOS-4 Geomagnetic Field Model

We present CHAOS-4, a new version in the CHAOS model series, which aims at describing the Earth's magnetic field with high spatial resolution (terms up to spherical degree n=90 for the crustal field, and up to n=16 for the time-varying core field are robustly determined) and high temporal resolution (allowing for investigations of sub-annual core field changes). More than 14 years of data from the satellites Ørsted (March 1999 to June 2013), CHAMP (July 2000 to September 2010) and SAC-C (2000 to 2004), augmented with ground observatory revised monthly mean values (1997 to 2013) have been used for this model. Maximum spherical harmonic degree of the static (crustal) field is n=100. The core field time changes are expressed by spherical harmonic expansion coefficients up to n=20, described by order 6 splines (with 6-month knot spacing) spanning the time interval 1997.0 to 2013.5. The third time derivative of the squared magnetic field intensity is regularized at the core-mantle boundary. No spatial regularization is applied for the core field, but the high-degree crustal field is regularized for n>85. As part of the modeling effort we co-estimate a model of the large-scale magnetospheric field (with expansions in the GSM and SM coordinate system up to degree n = 2 and parameterization of the time dependence using the decomposition of Dst into external (Est) and induced (Ist) parts) and perform an in-flight alignment of the vector data (co-estimation of the Euler describing the rotation between the coordinate systems of the vector magnetometer and of the star sensor providing attitude information). The final CHAOS-4 model is derived by merging two sub-models: its low-degree part has been obtained using similar model parameterization and data sets as used for previous CHAOS models (but of course including newer satellite observations), while its high-degree crustal field part is solely determined from low-altitude CHAMP satellite observations between January 2009 and September 2010.