Historical evolution of the geomagnetic declination at the Royal Observatory of Madrid

Tordesillas, Jose Manuel; Pavón-Carrasco, Francisco Javier; Nuñez, Alberto; Anquela, Ana Belén

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-15-81-2024

Articles | Volume 15, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-15-81-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

History of geophysical institutes and observatories

https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-15-81-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 2

Article

|

13 Nov 2024

Article |

| 13 Nov 2024

Historical evolution of the geomagnetic declination at the Royal Observatory of Madrid

Jose Manuel Tordesillas, Francisco Javier Pavón-Carrasco, Alberto Nuñez, and Ana Belén Anquela

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-15-81-2024-supplement

Data sets

World Data Centre for Geomagnetism: Edinburgh WDC https://geomag.bgs.ac.uk/data_service/data/annual_means.shtml

HISTMAG Conrad Observatorium https://cobs.zamg.ac.at/gsa/index.php/en/models-and-databases/histmag/

Short summary

In December 2021, the agonic line crossed the Royal Observatory of Madrid on its westward drift. The previous crossing by the agonic line, drifting eastward, is not accurately dated because declination measurements of that time are scarce. After collecting the data obtained in the Iberian Peninsula over the last 500 years and reducing them to ROM coordinates, a geomagnetic declination curve was generated. As a result, the previous cross ing been the agonic line was dated around the year 1652.