The Ring Current in Earth's Magnetosphere

  • Released Tuesday, May 12, 2026
  • Last updated Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at 11:28 AM EDT
View full credits

The ring current is a dynamic, doughnut-shaped region around Earth where charged particles flow in opposite directions along magnetic field lines, creating electrical currents. During a solar storm, changes in the ring current can lead to charge buildup on satellites, increased satellite drag, and magnetic fluctuations and induced currents on the ground that can affect pipelines and power lines.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Data model:
Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment (MAGE) model by Center for Geospace Storms (a NASA DRIVE Science Center)

Datasets used

  • GAMERA (Grid Agnostic MHD for Extended Research Applications)

    ID: 1201
    Type: Model Collected by: The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory LLC

    GAMERA is a new magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation tool building and improving upon the high-heritage Lyon-Fedder-Mobarry (LFM) code. GAMERA has been written completely from scratch in modern Fortran and provides a flexible, portable, and exascale-capable MHD code. GAMERA features multiple improvements over LFM including: minimal external library dependence, high degree of optimization, OpenMP parallelism allowing use of heterogeneous architectures, and multiple numerics upgrades. Thus, while preserving all key numerical algorithms underlying the LFM code, GAMERA provides a robust and user-friendly solution for sustainable future.

    Credit: References

    This dataset can be found at: https://cgs.jhuapl.edu/Models/gamera.php

    See all pages that use this dataset

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This page was originally published on Tuesday, May 12, 2026.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at 11:28 AM EDT.