Homogenization of the historical series from the Coimbra Magnetic Observatory, Portugal

Abstract

The Coimbra Magnetic Observatory (COI), Portugal, established in 1866, has provided nearly continuous records of the geomagnetic field elements for more than 150 years. However, during its long lifetime inevitable changes to the instruments and measurement procedures and even the relocation of the observatory have taken place. In our previous work (Morozova et al., 2014) we performed homogenization – elimination of the artificial changes – of the measured declination series (D) for the period from 1866 to 2006. In this paper we continue work on applying homogenization procedures to the measured series of the absolute monthly values of the horizontal (H, 1866–2006), vertical (Z, 1951–2006) and inclination components (I, 1866–1941). After homogenization of all measured series for the 1866–2006 time interval, we performed the homogenization of the series of all geomagnetic field elements (X, Y, Z, H, D, I and F) to the level of the 2015 epoch. Since all series except D have a gap of about 10 years in the middle of the 20th century, splitting each of them into two, the homogenization to the level of 2015 was done only for the series available after 1951 (with the D series homogenized for the whole time interval of 1866–2015). The COI geomagnetic field elements are available via the following addresses: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4308022 (Ribeiro et al., 2020) for the original COI data (ASCII and XLSX formats) and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4308036 (Morozova et al., 2020) for the homogenized COI data (ASCII and XLSX formats).