Reproducible Aspects of the Climate of Space Weather Over the Last Five Solar Cycles

Abstract

Each solar maximum interval has a different duration and peak activity level, which is reflected in the behavior of key physical variables that characterize solar and solar wind driving and magnetospheric response. The variation in the statistical distributions of the F10.7 index of solar coronal radio emissions, the dynamic pressure PDyn and effective convection electric field Ey in the solar wind observed in situ upstream of Earth, the ring current index DST, and the high-latitude auroral activity index AE are tracked across the last five solar maxima. For each physical variable we find that the distribution tail (the exceedences above a threshold) can be rescaled onto a single master distribution using the mean and variance specific to each solar maximum interval. We provide generalized Pareto distribution fits to the different master distributions for each of the variables. If the mean and variance of the large-to-extreme observations can be predicted for a given solar maximum, then their full distribution is known.