Correlations between measurements and numerical simulation results for ring current protons Original Research Article

ONERA-CERT Spatial Environment Department has developed a physical simulation of the radiation belts dynamics for known magnetospheric conditions called the Salammbô codes. Part of the problem now is concentrated on a good description of the occurrence of these magnetospheric conditions taking into account solar and magnetic variability. Because of several practical and scientific reasons that we will state in the text, we have paid particular attention to the global geomagnetic index Kp through a series of linear correlations with CRRES inflight measurements of proton fluxes in order to find a possible simple description of storm phenomena. As well, linear correlations between CRRES proton flux measurements (61 keV, 129 keV and 292 keV) and Salammbô 2D results have been made in order to validate the code and to understand the influence of the Kp index that is used as an input parameter in this numerical code.