Over a three day period from October 18-20, 1995, the earth encountered and passed through a large magnetic cloud. The interplanetary magnetic field in the cloud, as observed upstream by WIND, initially turned strongly south-ward, reaching about 20 nT, producing a major geomagnetic storm. The field then rotated gradually over a period of about 30 hours to become strongly northward, leading to the relaxation of the magnetosphere to a quiet state, until arrival of a corotating shock and high speed stream in the process of overtaking the cloud.
The exciting event fortuitously occurred during Interval 1 of the First IACG Science Campaign, and there is a wealth of coordinated space-craft and ground based observations taken of it. To compliment these data and to help understand the events globally, we present the results of a global MHD simulation of the magnetosphere for this period. The simulation was performed using the actual WIND plasma and field data as input. We relate and compare our results with the observations presented in companion papers in this session.
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