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Digitised magnetogram data from the Carrington storm 25th August to 5th September 1859 recorded at Greenwich and Kew Gardens

Dataset title Digitised magnetogram data from the Carrington storm 25th August to 5th September 1859 recorded at Greenwich and Kew Gardens
Dataset creators C. D. Beggan, British Geological Survey
E. Clarke, British Geological Survey
E. Florczak, British Geological Survey
E. Eaton, British Geological Survey
J. Williamson, British Geological Survey
K. Matsumoto, Nagoya University, Japan
H. Hayakawa, Nagoya University, Japan
Dataset theme Geoscientific Information
Dataset abstract

This dataset is the most complete digitised magnetic records (as of Nov 2023) of the ten-day period from 25th August to 5th September 1859 encompassing the Carrington storm and its lesser recognised precursor on the 28th August. Based on digital images of the magnetograms from the BGS online archive collection and information from the observatory yearbooks and scientific papers, it is possible to scale the measurements to SI units (degrees of angle and nanoTesla) and extract quasi-minute cadence spot values.

The contents of the zip file are various data in ASCII text files plus a readme and example code for plotting the data file.

  • README.txt - small text file
  • plot_Carrington1859_paper_plots_with_correlation.py - example code in Python3.7 to create plots
  • bartels: folder containing digitised KEW data from Bartels (1937) paper
  • hdz: folder containing extracted KEW and GRW data in single files with time, Horizontal (H), Declination (D) and Vertical (Z) magnetic field components
  • IAGA2002: folder with KEW and GRW data in IAGA-2002 formatted files with standard headers
  • spot_values: GRW spot values taken from the 1859 yearbook tables in csv and txt files
Dataset content dates 25/08/1859 to 05/09/1859
Dataset spatial coverage Greenwich, London
Kew Gardens, London
Dataset supply format csv, text files in ASCII
Dataset language English-United Kingdom
Dataset discovery metadata record Discovery Link to the dataset's BGS Discovery Metadata record
Dataset publisher NERC EDS National Geoscience Data Centre
Dataset publication date 21st November 2023
Dataset digital object identifier (DOI) 10.5285/c03ec758-d74d-4267-97fe-1be409f4c366
Dataset citation text Beggan, C. D., Clarke, E., Florczak, E., Eaton, E. M., Williamson, J., Matsumoto, K., Hayakawa, H. (2023). Digitised magnetogram data from the Carrington storm 25th August to 5th September 1859 recorded at Greenwich and Kew Gardens. NERC EDS National Geoscience Data Centre. (Dataset). https://doi.org/10.5285/c03ec758-d74d-4267-97fe-1be409f4c366
Constraints and terms of use This data set is available under Open Government Licence, subject to the following acknowledgement accompanying any reproduced materials: "Contains data supplied by permission of the Natural Environment Research Council [YEAR]".
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