The Inter-Agency Consultative Group's (IACG) 1st Campaign started out with a bang! Planned for over a month ahead of time, October 19th to the 21st, 1995 was set aside as the 1st interval of many to correlate data from Geotail, Wind, Interball, ground-based facilities, and many other important spacecraft. One of the goals of the 1st Campaign is to study structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere. During the 1st interval, the solar wind could not have cooperated more when a huge interplanetary magnetic cloud hit the Earth's magnetosphere. A wealth of data is becoming available for analysis of this event. This presentation will review many of the observations that are making this analysis a truly unique correlative science opportunity.
At about 11:25 UT on October 18 the Wind spacecraft observed an interplanetary shock wave traveling at approximately 380 km/s which preceded a very large magnetic cloud. The magnetic field structure of the magnetic cloud is consistent with a flux rope geometry with a strong southward then northward IMF. Just after entering the cloud the geomagnetic activity on the Earth's surface increased rapidly. The geomagnetic activity subsided at around 10 UT on October 19th when the IMF rotated from southward to northward. There was a marked decrease in the geomagnetic activity associated with the interval of strong northward IMF. Around 2 UT on October 20th the cloud finally passed the Earth.
An IACG World-Wide-Web site for this event is now operational and is being used to coordinate much of the campaign data information. The Web site is reachable at the location http://iacg.org.
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