Van Allen Probe A WFR Wave Normal Angle and other Sheath-Corrected-E Polarization Parameters at 6 s cadence

Wave Normal Analysis survey data products, derived from the Van Allen Probes A EMFISIS Wave Form Receiver Electric (E) and Magnetic Field (B) onboard averaged power spectral matrices. The survey data consists of E and B measurements from 6 orthogonal antenna at 65 logarithmically spaced frequency measurements from 2 to 11240 Hz at a cadence of 6 sec. Besides wave normal angle, some of the other products are magnetic ellipticity, degree of polarization, planarity, Poynting flux. The products are produced via PRASSADCO (Santolik, et al., 2003). A correction for antenna sheath effects has been applied to the electric field data, before being input to PRASSADCO. The correction is density-dependent, so fill values are inserted for E-dependent data where a density estimate is not available. Be aware that the spin-plane E antennas began deployment at 2012-09-13T19:44 and were not fully deployed until 2012-09-22T19:48. The spin-axis deployment began on 2012-09-24T17:59 and did not fully complete until 2012-12-07T04:41. Noise levels in the E data are increased by incomplete antenna deployment. There was a significant upgrade to the onboard calibration tables, for both E and B in Feb 2013. Prior to this, the highest survey frequency bin (11.24 kHz) used a flawed calibration value that resulted in both amplitude and phase errors. The effect is stronger for the B data. New, corrected, tables took effect at 2013-02-12T04:30:00. In Mar 2013, there was a ~2-day interval where a software issue resulted in the wrong calibration tables being used for both E and B data. These data should be used with extreme caution. The interval is 2013-03-21T06:53:00 to 2013-03-23T05:46:00.

     Santolík, O., M. Parrot, and F. Lefeuvre (2003), Singular value decomposition methods for wave propagation analysis, Radio Sci., 38, 1010, doi:10.1029/2000RS002523, 1.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Maintainer NASA Space Physics Data Facility
Last Updated September 7, 2026, 23:58 (UTC)
Created August 10, 2026, 19:36 (UTC)
accessLevel public
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harvest_source_title Science Discovery Engine
identifier /SDE/SPASE_JSON/|spase://NASA/NumericalData/RBSP/A/EMFISIS/WFR/L4/WaveNormalAngle_Sheath-Corrected-E/PT6S
license https://www.usa.gov/government-works
modified 2026-08-31T22:16:00Z
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