Deterministic dynamics of the magnetosphere: results of the 0–1 test

Abstract. A test for deterministic dynamics in a time series data, namely the 0–1 test (Gottawald and Melbourne, 2004, 2005), is used to study the magnetospheric dynamics. The data, corresponding to the same time period, of the auroral electrojet index AL and the magnetic field component B_z of the solar wind magnetic field measured at 1 AU are used to compute the parameter K, which is zero for non-chaotic and unity for chaotic systems. For the magnetosphere and also for the turbulent solar wind, K has values corresponding to a nonlinear dynamical system with chaotic behaviour. This result is consistent with the Lyapunov exponents computed from the same time series data.